Feature Stories

Brave New Burbs: Indy's Outlying Areas Are Booming

Nancy Comiskey — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:18:00 GMT

Zach Dobson steps into Joe’s Butcher Shop, sandwiched between Auntie Em’s custard shop and Mary & Martha’s boutique on Carmel’s Main Street. A meat-cutter in a white apron waves from behind the L-shaped glass counter and greets the 30-year-old photographer by name. Inside the cases are neat rows of pink chops, marbled roasts, and thick-sliced bacon. Zach and his wife, Courtney, are regulars at Joe’s. They shop here because they can buy locally raised meat, because they like the sense of community that comes from knowing the owners, and because they can walk here from their home on the edge of the Arts & Design District.

Six years ago, Zach and Courtney moved to Carmel from Chicago. They had lived near Wrigleyville in the city and were used to having everything close by—shops, restaurants, and parks all within walking distance. When the couple decided to move to Indianapolis to be closer to their families, they looked for that same urban feel in neighborhoods downtown and in Broad Ripple. But they wanted to start a family and were attracted by the quality of the Carmel schools. They liked how the suburb was reenergizing its once-sleepy core with apartments and galleries, so they rented a townhouse near the City Center and eventually bought their midcentury-modern home.

Last year, Zach opened a small but sleek new studio, Zach Dobson Photography, on a side street near the Palladium. It’s three minutes from home by car, and on nice days, he can bike. Because lower taxes and rent in Carmel offset the cost of travel, Zach can compete for jobs with photographers who live in New York and Los Angeles.

In their free time, Zach and Courtney walk along Main Street’s brick sidewalks with their two children, sometimes splitting a salad and a tenderloin at Muldoon’s or mixing with the crowd at Bub’s along the Monon Trail. They poke around the Old Town Antique Mall. Driving is the exception, not the rule.

“We had a long-term vision for our family, and Carmel was just the best fit,” Zach says. “And you can still be in an urban environment.”

Zach and Courtney are among the roughly 86 million so-called “millennials”—a generation spanning ages 20 to 34—who are compelling cities and suburbs alike to think differently about neighborhoods. This demographic drove the resurgence of big-city districts in the past decade—places like Mass Ave and Fountain Square in Indianapolis. Now the surrounding areas are waking up, too. Recognizing that their relative youth and cheap land won’t last forever, Indy’s suburbs are aspiring to be culturally relevant, competitive for the “best and brightest” workers, and maybe even a little bit hip—primarily through a movement called “new urbanism.”

New urbanism is characterized by walkable, high-density, mixed-use developments. Storefronts are designed for sidewalk appeal, and parking lots are hidden underground or behind buildings. You see it most clearly in Carmel, a nondescript Quaker town that was just a stop on the Monon Railroad before waves of upscale development began in the ’70s. Now, out of a sea of subdivisions have emerged the Arts & Design District, City Center, and the Village of WestClay.

Of course, these islands of urbanism are emerging in the outer rings of Indianapolis’s suburbs. Things aren’t so promising in the first ring built in Marion County’s townships in the ’50s and ’60s. With no town centers, outdated housing styles, aging retail strip malls, and crime problems, those early suburbs have become a cautionary tale. Just ask Aaron Renn, the Hoosier-born, Rhode Island–based city planner whose Urbanophile blog is followed by new urbanists across the country. “Anyone who’s in Fishers or Avon or Plainfield or Greenwood should just look at what’s happening in Warren Township or Wayne Township and say, ‘That’s us unless we do something different,’” he says. “You need to get ahead of the game and put in amenities that will continue to attract people over the long haul. You’re not going to be the shiny new thing forever.”

THE GREAT MIGRATION

Back in the late 1800s, Indianapolis, like most cities in the industrial north, was a dirty, smelly place. Horses still pulled carts and carriages around the Mile Square, and people burned coal for heat, creating clouds of soot and ash. The housekeeper who hung out white sheets to dry at noon gathered in gray ones an hour later.

Well-to-do citizens sought to escape the grit of the city for the fresh, clean air of the country—or so Woodruff Place and Irvington were considered at the time. Families in these first suburbs lived in gracious homes on tree-lined streets and took streetcars to work.

Residential development continued slowly, then stalled during the Depression and World War II, when both money and building materials were in short supply. Then came the Baby Boom. “Suddenly, all these servicemen were coming home, getting married, and starting families,” says Robert Barrows, professor of history and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis. “They were doubled up with relatives and friends and desperate to have a place of their own.”

Inspired by the country’s first mass-produced homes in Levittown on Long Island, developers bought up cheap farmland on the outskirts of cities. In Indianapolis, zoning laws separated housing from retail—no more hardware stores or restaurants with the owners living upstairs. Thousands of affordable single-family dwellings sprouted in Washington, Warren, and Wayne townships. Half of the American dream was owning a home. The other half, which fit into this new lifestyle, was owning a car.

The suburban migration wasn’t limited to whites. Middle-class black families moved up the Michigan Road corridor. “We tend to focus on so-called ‘white flight,’” Barrows says, “but it’s well to keep in mind there was ‘black flight’ for many of the same reasons—a desire for better housing and schools.”

In 1970, when Unigov popped out Indianapolis’s boundaries overnight to the Marion County line, homeowners began looking to the contiguous counties, where taxes were lower and lots were bigger. When Judge S. Hugh Dillin ordered Indianapolis Public Schools to begin busing black students to township districts in 1973, the pace quickened. Hamilton County doubled its population between 1970 and 1990.

Millennials are the largest generation in U.S. history. Indy's suburbs realize they have to attract them to thrive.

Developers like Pulte, Drees, and Estridge bought up land in outlying counties for subdivisions, offering homes in a limited range of styles and prices. As a result, homogenous developments lined crowded collector roads like Hamilton County’s Springmill. Town and city planners struggled to keep up with schools, roads, water, and police and fire protection, though most did well thanks to property-tax revenues from newcomers. But long-term planning has been a luxury. When he was elected in 1995, Carmel Mayor James Brainard became one of the first and most outspoken advocates of new urbanism as a more sustainable alternative to this suburban sprawl. Now other Indy suburbs are looking at ways to ensure their own futures when the open land runs out.

And that’s a good thing, says Frank Nierzwicki, a city planner since 1985 who now teaches at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs. “Change is sometimes not easy,” he says. “But if you do nothing, you’ll still have change. You just won’t be able to control it.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING URBANIST

New urbanists like Brainard and Renn say the automobile-based design of subdivisions is bad for the environment, our health, and our psyches. “We used to have beautiful traditional towns before we tried to design everything around our cars,” Brainard says. “We’ll still accommodate the car, but let’s design cities for people instead.”

The central theme of new urbanism is walkability. Urban planner Jeff Speck is the author of Walkable City, and his firm designed Carmel’s ambitious Midtown plan, which will connect the Arts & Design District and City Center. People have to make the choice to walk, he says, and they won’t do that unless communities are safe, comfortable, useful, and interesting.

It’s those last two factors with which booming suburbs like Fishers and Avon are struggling. Yet today’s millennials are demanding all four. They want to walk to restaurants and coffee shops and cultural events. They expect bike trails and recreation nearby. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they’re not in a big hurry to buy a home. And they may be more interested in upgrading their smartphone than buying a car.

Millennials are the largest generation in U.S. history, outnumbering even their Baby Boomer parents, and Indy’s suburban leaders realize they have to attract this youthful demographic to thrive. Scott Fadness, Fishers’s town manager, is well aware of the importance of young residents to his city’s future. “All these things we’re doing—whether it’s mixed-use development or path connectivity or Wi-Fi access—it’s all being influenced by this next generation and their affinity for a level of connectivity and ease of access that just wasn’t in demand 20 or 30 years ago. ”

Some Baby Boomers, often born and bred in the suburbs of the ’50s and ’60s, are embracing the same ideals. No longer interested in maintaining a big house and yard, they are downsizing to upscale lofts and condos in downtowns or Traditional Neighborhood Developments—TNDs for short—like the Village of WestClay.

Cathy Catellier, 62, browsed at Nature’s Karma in Carmel’s City Center with her grandson Cooper on a recent rainy Sunday. Cathy, executive assistant to Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, and her husband, Steve, lived in both Noblesville and Geist before renting a rooftop terrace in City Center. Now they bike the Monon and walk to concerts at the Palladium. Cathy worried at first about the transition to apartment living, but no more: “We feel comfortable, but we still have that city feel.”

Speck says people tend to fall in a housing continuum that looks like this: traditional suburbs, then TNDs, then suburban city centers, then downtown. Families with small children are usually at one end, and millennials and some Baby Boomers, like the Catelliers, are at the other.

Mayor Brainard believes travel has made millennials and empty-nesters more open to new ideas. They visit other cities and sit in beautiful sidewalk cafes and wander narrow streets and then come home and talk about their wonderful vacations.

“Why can’t we build cities like that?” the mayor asks rhetorically.

“Who goes for a romantic walk by a big-box store in a 10-acre parking lot?”

He lets the questions hang there for a moment.

“We can do better.”

LESSONS FROM CARMEL

The conference room in Carmel’s Town Hall looks out over the Monon Trail as it cuts between the Palladium and Pedcor’s seven-story mixed-use development. Mayor Brainard shares a story he tells often. “We even had opposition to the Monon when it was first introduced,” he says with a laugh. “We had a protest in front of City Hall.”

Now it’s hard to imagine Carmel without the Monon. The five-term mayor says his city has a track record of building things people like. Last year, Money magazine named Carmel the best place to live in the United States, citing its good schools and healthcare, low unemployment, and abundance of things to do. CNN and Newsweek praised the city’s roundabout program, noting an 80 percent drop in injuries at busy intersections. Author Speck calls Carmel a model for turning an automotive suburb into a city with a truly walkable downtown.

If the Midtown project goes forward, it will create a “linear village” along the Monon Trail to join the thriving Arts & Design District and City Center. “The whole premise behind Midtown is when you connect two walkable areas, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” Speck says.

Those parts are impressive if not universally admired. Visit carmelchatter.com, and you’ll see posts like “Carmel Redevelop-
ment Commission in great shape! Not!” or “Palladium being blamed for Symphony’s problems.” There are quibbles about the price and style of Seward Johnson’s Rockwellian sculptures and concerns about the grandiosity of the Palladium.

And with some reason. Revenue from the $175 million Center for the Performing Arts, which includes the Palladium and two smaller theaters, fell short of projections in its first two years, so the Carmel City Council had to provide funds to pay the bills; the council is also refinancing $195 million of the Carmel Redevelopment Commission’s $267 million in debt to complete other City Center projects. That last figure led Carmel to be named in the top 10 of the state’s 2012 ranking of local government debt. But Brainard argues that Carmel’s debt is low compared to its assessed value. No residential tax dollars go into CRC projects, he adds, and the city’s AA+ bond rating was recently confirmed. Projects funded by tax increment financing districts, or TIFs, he says, are a gift to future generations.

Urbanophile blogger Renn is no fan of the Palladium—both because of its style and its cost—but he defends Carmel’s investment in its downtown, as well as its demand for high-quality building design. The debt has to be seen in the context of the city’s ability to repay it, which is high, he says. Still, he wishes a district named for “Arts & Design” had an edgier, more modern aesthetic. He rejects what he calls the “throwback” architecture he sees in so many new-urbanism developments. “When those styles are not indigenous to the region, not authentically Hoosier, it enhances the artificiality of them,” he says.

City Center’s Pedcor building does have a Disney World feel. Streets are spotless, and buildings follow the same European theme. Still, its charm is hard to dismiss. Even on a rainy afternoon, the patterned brick streets glisten, the terraces draw the eye upward, and the spacious windows of shops like Uber Boutique and Addendum invite you to step inside. Which may be why occupancy rates here and along Main Street are so high. Apartments are more than 95 percent leased at City Center and close to 100 percent gone at Sophia Square and Old Town on the Monon, in the Arts & Design District.

It’s hard to determine exactly how much influence City Center and the Arts & Design District have had in attracting a growing list of companies to Carmel. Good schools, high median incomes, and, yes, traditional upscale subdivisions also play a role. But these districts do provide urban living options that didn’t exist before.

SUBURBAN SOUL-SEARCHING

Other suburbs watching Carmel’s downtown development shouldn’t make the mistake of trying to copy it verbatim, says Brad Beaubien, director of the Ball State University College of Architecture and Planning Indianapolis Center. They need to find their own identities and figure out what makes them distinctive. “Otherwise, you’re just a sea of vinyl villages and subdivisions that don’t have any intrinsic value to them.”

This sense of place may be second in importance only to walkability. Carmel built its downtown around arts and design. Zionsville, in Boone County, has long established itself as a quaint Indiana village, with what Renn calls “one of the nicest Main Streets in Indiana.” But other suburbs with booming populations are still struggling to define themselves while building on what attracted residents to them in the first place.

Though Noblesville’s population has grown by more than 80 percent over the last decade, its downtown has yet to reach its potential, Renn says. The Hamilton County seat arguably has more natural assets than any other Indianapolis suburb: one of the state’s great courthouses surrounded by beautiful historic buildings; pleasant downtown streets with sidewalks and traditional homes; and an enviable setting on White River. New restaurants and shops are popping up on the square, but there’s opportunity for more. “I’m surprised it is not a hugely upscale destination because, frankly, Carmel has been trying to replicate what Noblesville already has,” says Renn. “Its assets are better than its performance.”

In Greenwood, popular with young families attracted by Center Grove schools, city planners have struggled for years to redevelop the original town center at Main and Madison streets. The plan, released in 2007, calls for rehabbing buildings, improving streets and sidewalks, and locating government offices there, but progress has been slowed by the economic slump and a population that’s less affluent than Carmel’s. As one planner noted sympathetically, “It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have poor people to deal with.”

But Fishers is where the next and most dramatic new-urbanist changes are likely to occur. Young families drawn by easy access to I-69, affordable housing, and good schools have made it one of the fastest-growing towns in the United States—its population jumped from 2,000 in 1980 to nearly 80,000 today. The town council has kept up with schools, roads, and city services, leading Fishers to regularly appear on best towns and suburbs lists compiled by Money, Forbes, and Bloomberg Businessweek.

But the town, soon to be a city after last November’s referendum, has seen such a rapid influx of newcomers, town manager Scott Fadness says, that it has yet to come into its own. The half-dozen brick buildings in the current core—the town hall, library, police department, fire station, amphitheater, and train station—are new and attractive and surrounded with green space and trails. Construction will begin soon on the Nickel Plate District’s first mixed-use project. Right now, though, there’s little to make you want to linger—or to cross the formidable, multi-laned 116th Street.

Creating an urbanized town center from scratch is daunting but not impossible, says Walkable City author Speck. A small-but-
perfect, pedestrian-friendly core—perhaps just a few blocks—is the goal. Fadness sees Fishers as Hamilton County’s sleeping giant, with all the pieces required for a strong sense of place: family-friendly activities, good schools, a strong work ethic, a commitment to nurturing entrepreneurs. It’s just a matter of putting the puzzle together—and shifting away from a suburb that is almost 100 percent driven by people getting into their cars.

That’s why Fadness calls rapid transit a “game changer” for his community, and for Indianapolis. While city leaders have talked about mass transit for decades, a bill in the Legislature as of press time would allow residents in Marion and Hamilton counties to vote to fund the initial phase, which would cost an estimated $1.3 billion over 10 years.

The most realistic first step is bus rapid transit (BRT). Think train cars on rubber wheels. Public transportation initiative Indy Connect foresees five lines linking downtown and suburbs like Fishers and Noblesville. BRT would run in dedicated lanes and travel faster than traffic.

If rapid transit materializes, it would likely spur more higher-density, mixed-use development around stations. “The best way that urban suburbs can support the city is by creating walkable communities that are effective nodes for transit,” Speck says. “If there’s a transit stop you can walk to, you’re much more willing to come into the city.”

A SUBURB OF SOMEWHERE

So will more-vibrant suburbs mean a healthier city? Indy burbs are banking on the same millennials who moved to the city in recent years migrating to urban centers in the suburbs (where they’ll have coffee shops, walkable streets, lofts—and great schools). But migration can go the other way, too. Suburbs with thriving cores can be a “gateway drug” to the city, Speck says: “Once born-and-raised suburbanites experience mixed-use, the coffee shop downstairs, houses that touch each other, we naturalize those in our minds. We are much more prepared to consider downtown living.”

Plus, you don’t improve a city by keeping its suburbs down, Ball State’s Beaubien says. A healthy city has to have healthy suburbs—it’s not one or the other. And the more choices a region provides, the better. “It’s the equivalent of a community only
having a Ford dealership,” he says. “If someone wants a Toyota, they’re going to have to go somewhere else.”

Competition for millennials and empty-nesters could also force Indianapolis to bring more energy to neighborhood progress. Adam Thies, director of the Department of Metropolitan Development, says the city is poised to capitalize on the demographic shift by promoting the authenticity of its older neighborhoods. Those efforts can be seen in Fall Creek Place and Irvington as well as the near-eastside improvements funded by the Super Bowl Legacy Project.

The larger point, though, may be that in today’s global climate, we compete not just as a city or a suburb, but as a region. Which means everybody needs to bring their A game to development. “When Fishers and Avon and Zionsville and Noblesville and Carmel are all being the best they can be,” Renn says, “that’s better for everyone.”

Illustration by Stacy Newgent

This article appeared in the April 2013 issue.

King of the Kill: An Excerpt of Frank Bill's New Novel, Donnybrook

Frank Bill — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:34:00 GMT

A few years ago, some writerly friends of mine passed around the short stories of an obscure author from the sticks of Southern Indiana, as if his prose were a smoldering joint. So, like most illicit pleasures, the fiction of Frank Bill came to me with a wink and a nod. “Try it,” they said. “You’re gonna like it.” They were right. Bill’s words, protagonists, and endings were blunt, cruel, and dark. As a Southern Indiana boy myself (who stuck mostly to town), I’d always had a healthy fear of—and fascination with—the dimly lit trailer park, the hog farms’ blood-curdling squeals, and the secrets held by junked cars in gnarled hardwood forests. The jagged pieces in Bill’s 2011 collection of short stories, Crimes in Southern Indiana, provided a cracked window into these and similar venues, best read with one eye on the text and the other on the door.

Something was bound to go wrong—and it always did. In literature, the term is “Chekhov’s gun,” a dramatist’s rule of foreshadowing. It means if the writer devises a gun—metaphorical or otherwise—at the beginning of a story or play, it must go off by the end. But in Bill’s “grit lit,” as the genre is known, I’ve learned there’s a corollary to the principle: Yes, the gun must go off (and it will, frequently), but when it does, neither the target nor the shooter is safe. Bad decisions have bad consequences. Ultimately we, the readers, are the collateral damage—hearts soured by unnatural men (and women) who commit damning acts we know come far too naturally.

Now hailed as a hayseed Tarantino or a latter-day Steinbeck, Bill, a 39-year-old native and resident of Corydon, began his writing career across the Ohio River in Louisville, as a forklift driver in a paint-additive factory. Self-taught, he spent his downtime scribbling in a notebook, sketching desperate tales culled from the plight of real-life family members, friends, and twangy bogeymen. Born was Crimes, a work featured in Playboy and praised by GQ.

The following passage is excerpted from Bill’s forthcoming first novel, Donnybrook, due out this month and heralded by publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux as “a nightmare vision of the American Heartland.” Try it. You’re gonna like it. Wink. Nod.

—Michael Rubino

EXCERPT: DONNYBROOK

I can’t feed my babies, Zeek and Caleb, from jail, Jarhead Earl thought. But this was his chance to give them a better life

He thumbed two more 12-gauge slugs into the shotgun’s chamber.

The click of the first slug had echoed in Dote Conrad’s ears after he’d handed the 12-gauge automatic with a full choke to Jarhead.

The barrel raised, Jarhead said, “Put your hands high. Turn to me, slow.”

Dote could’ve grabbed any one of the rifles or shotguns that lined the wall in front of him behind the counter of his gun shop. But none were loaded.

He raised his hairy appendages. Spread them like a football field’s goalposts.

Hands level with his ears poking out of his brown trucker’s cap, faded rebel flag across the front. He wore a gray T-shirt. Red suspenders going down over his keg belly. Brass clips pinched the waistband of his camo pants. Said, “We got layaway if you can’t
buy it today. Deer season’s still a ways off.”

Jarhead said, “I ain’t buying shit. You walk to the end of the counter. I’ll follow you to the safe in back. ’Less you got enough in the register.”

Everyone in Hazard knew Dote only deposited his sales once a month. Kept a safe and register packed with big bills. Had never kept a loaded pistol behind the counter for personal protection. There was never a need to worry about being robbed in a small-town gun shop out in the hills of southeastern Kentucky where, after first grade, everyone knew who they’d marry and have kids with.

Dote tried, “Know times is tough. People out of work with the economy bein’ in a slump. Hear the state be hiring for the road crews real soon. Whatever it is you don’t have ain’t gonna be got by doin’ whatever it is you plan on doin’ with that shotgun.”

Zeek and Caleb’s grit-smeared faces branded Jarhead’s mind with their whining—I’s hungry, Dada. He didn’t have time for Dote’s recommendations. “Let’s see what you got in the register first.”

“Jarhead, I can’t—”

Jarhead veered the barrel two feet away from Dote. Blew a hole in the wall. The shell hit the counter. Another fell into place. Dote’s ears rang as he reached for the gun barrel. Jarhead pushed into the counter. Butted the hot barrel through Dote’s hands. Stabbed it into Dote’s coral nose like a spear. Cartilage popped. Dote hollered, “Shit!” Tears fell from his blinking eyes.

Jarhead said, “I ain’t asking.”

Dote bent away from the barrel. His camo pants went dark in the crotch. Loose skin hanging from his arms wavered. Sweat creased the age spots of his forehead. He felt weak and idiotic, knowing that if he had a gun, he’d shoot this thieving bastard. He waddled to the register, cursing to himself, who’d have thought he’d bring his own goddamned ammo. Punching a few buttons, he opened it with one hand while the other pinched his nose. Pulled a wad of twenties from the tray. Then a wad of tens and fives. Laid them on the glass counter.

Jarhead ordered, “Count it so I can hear you.”

When Dote counted out one thousand dollars, Jarhead shouted, “Stop!”

Half a stack of twenties remained. Dote spoke through his clogged nose. “You don’t want it all?”

“Don’t need it all.” Held the shotgun one-handed. Reached into his back pocket. Laid a plastic Walmart sack on the counter. “Put the one thousand in the sack.”

Dote stuffed the money into the sack. Blood from his busted nose dotted the bills he pushed to Jarhead, who grabbed the sack, said, “Lace your fingers behind your head. Back up. Turn around. Go into the back room.”

The thought of never seeing his wife, who ate fried chicken livers breaded with her mother’s secret recipe and watched the Home Shopping Network on satellite while he ran the gun shop, sent a shock of worry through Dote’s body. And he pleaded, “Come on now, wait!”

Jarhead motioned the gun barrel. “Turn around!” Dote did. Walked sideways to the counter’s end, where Jarhead met the rear
of his head. Pressed the barrel into it. Walked Dote through the curtain into the back room, where boxes of ammunition were stacked among crates of unopened rifles. Here was the fucking ammo he needed and Jarhead told him, “Get on your knees.”

Dote’s face warmed with tears. Clear mucus mixed with blood.

“Please!” he begged. “Please!”

His knees cracked down onto the cold, hard concrete floor. Jarhead followed him with the still-warm barrel of the gun. Touched the rear of Dote’s skull. Then Dote fell forward from the loud shudder that rippled through his body.

Red and blue lights lit up the rear window of the primered Ford Galaxy. Next to Jarhead sat the Walmart sack of cash. Socks. Underwear. Cutoff jeans and a T-shirt rolled up inside also. Across the passenger’s seat lay the map a fighter who went by the name Combine Elder had detailed for Jarhead. Directions to the Donnybrook.

Jarhead’d learned about Donnybrook two nights ago, after he’d beaten Combine Elder into twelve unknown shades of purple. Afterward, Combine had smirked at the unblemished rawhide outline and wheat-tinted hair of Jarhead Earl, his razor-tight arms clawed by black and red amateur tattoos hanging by his sides. Combine told him, “Son, you oughta enter Donnybrook. You could be the next Ali Squires.”

Ali Squires: Bare. Knuckle. God.

Squires was beaten only once, by a man went by Chainsaw Angus.

His knees cracked down onto the cold, hard concrete floor. Jarhead followed him with the still-warm barrel of the gun. Touched the rear of Dote's skull.

Combine told Jarhead that Donnybrook was a three-day bare-knuckles tournament, held once a year every August. Run by the sadistic and rich-as-fuck Bellmont McGill on a thousand-acre plot out in the sticks. Twenty fighters entered a fence-wire ring. Fought till one man was left standing. Hordes of onlookers—men and women who used drugs and booze, wagered and grilled food—watched the fighting. Two fights Friday. Four Saturday. The six winners fought Sunday for one hundred grand.

The two jobs Jarhead worked, towing for a junkyard during the day, then flipping burgers and waffles two or three nights a week, hardly provided enough cash to feed and clothe his two smiling-eyed progeny. Boys created with the comeliest female in the Kentucky hills, Tammy Charles.

In between his jobs he jogged through the mining hills that gave his stepfather black lung and his mother gunpowder suicide. He pounded the homemade heavy bag that hung from a tree in front of his trailer till his hands burned red. Training for his next bare-knuckle payday out in an abandoned barn or tavern parking lot. Farmers. Miners. Loggers. Drunks. Wagering on another man’s will.

Altogether, the money he was making came nowhere close to one hundred grand.

Donnybrook would be Jarhead’s escape from the poverty that had whittled his family down to names in the town obituaries. He just needed the thousand-dollar fighter’s fee to enter.

Jarhead pulled to a stop off the side of a back road somewhere outside of Frankfort, worry from the robbery tensing his hands damp on the steering wheel.

The cruiser’s door opened. The outline of the county cop approached. Jarhead had his window rolled down. Watched the shadow trail toward his car in the rearview. The officer stopped at his window.

Should I open the door, punch him in his throat, his temple? Can’t get caught if I’m going to help my babies and my girl, thought Jarhead.

And the officer said, “Evening. Know you got a busted taillight?”

Shit! rang through Jarhead’s bones. All that worry for nothing.

Smiling, sweating, Jarhead said, “Why, no, sir. I sure didn’t. Which side might it be?”

Pointing, the officer said, “Right back on your passenger’s side.”

“Well, I’ll be having to get that fixed shortly.”

“Can I see your license and registration?”

“Sure, sure.”

Jarhead pulled his license from his wallet. Registration from his glove compartment. Handed them over.

Officer took them. Read over the name. Address. Said, “Long ways from home, ain’t you, Johnny. Taking a trip?”

“Yeah. Going to visit friends and family up in Indiana.”

“What part of Indiana?”

Nosy. “Down over in Orange County.”

“The southern part. I got kin down in that neck of the woods myself. Who’s your people? Might be some acquaintance.”

This is how they catch sons a bitches, Jarhead thought. Hare-brained coincidences. He told the only name he could think, one that Combine Elder told him. “McGill. Bellmont McGill.”

The officer parted a big rabbit-toothed smile, said, “Yeah, I remember old McGill. Owns damn near half of Orange County since his in-laws passed. Lots say he’s rougher than a cob. Never had no cross words with him. He’s tough. Not one you’d cross. Other than that, seems a fair shake. That your daddy’s side or your mamma’s?”

Son of a bitch must be writing an oratory on hill country families. “My daddy’s.”

Officer’s face went odd. “Daddy’s? I don’t recollect McGill having brothers, nor uncles. His parents was only children, like he. How you related to—” That’s when the radio on the officer’s side dragged static. Came across with an all-points bulletin. “All units be advised of a black-primered Ford Galaxy. Plate number—”

Jarhead slammed his door into the officer’s knees. Got out. Left-right-left-punched him to the ground while his radio spit, “Suspect Johnny Earl is considered armed and dangerous. Wanted for armed robbery in Hazard, Kentucky.”

Jarhead rolled the officer facedown. Thumbed the snap open on the officer’s leather cuff holder. Pulled the handcuffs
out and cuffed his wrists behind his back.

Jarhead grabbed his license and registration. Stuffed them down into his pocket. Dragged the cop to his cruiser. Popped the trunk from inside the car and heaved him inside. Closed it. Drove the cruiser out into the woods away from the road. Killed the flashing lights. Tossed the keys into the front seat.

He’d made it back to his Ford Galaxy when a set of headlights came down the road. Blinded him. Stopped. A thick-bearded man sat inside an old International truck with the radio blaring—“It’s All Good” by Seasick Steve. The man looked at Jarhead through the rolled-down window, asked, “Everything all right, buddy?”

Jarhead reached into his car. Grabbed his map, the Walmart sack, and said, smiling, “No, it’s not. I’s having some car troubles. Believe she’s seen her last mile. Think I could get a lift?”

The man shook his head, said, “Why sure.”

Jarhead got in. Strong waft of fuel burned his eyes. The man shifted into gear. Then offered a hand. “Tig Stanley. Don’t mind the gas smell. Just doing a few nightly runs.”

Jarhead shook his hand, said, “Fine by me. Name’s Johnny Earl. But you can call me Jarhead.”

Tig ground the gears. Asked, “Where you headed, Jarhead?”

“Orange County, Indiana.”

Tig smiled. “It’s your lucky night, son. I can get you to Brandenburg, where my cousin runs our business. They’s a bridge’ll take you over the Ohio River on 135 into Mauckport, Indiana. From there it’s about forty-five minutes or better to Orange County. But I still got a few more stops to make. You give me a hand, I can pay you, get you to Orange County in a day or two.”

“Fine by me long as I make it by Friday. Type of work you do this time of night out here in the boonies?”

Tig pulled a plastic puck of Kodiak from his dash. Tapped it on the steering wheel. Opened it. Pinched a chew into his lip. His eyes lit up, and he said, “You’ll see.”

When Jarhead saw a light come on inside the house, he cursed under his breath. He stood out in the country road by Tig’s truck with the cloak of night all around, the truck running with the lights off. This was the fifth and final house.

A full moon guided Jarhead’s quick jaunt up the drive. He watched each room of the house come to life with light, the shadow inside bouncing from room to room. Jarhead’s heart raced, him hoping he’d make it to Tig before the shadow did.

Out back of the house a dog barked. Sounded like it weighed two hundred pounds.

Tig lay under the rear of the truck. Gas container. Small hose. Handheld, battery-powered drill. Maglite. Gas being siphoned from the tank and into the red container. Tig and his cousin would sell it for a cheaper price than was paid at the pump.

The creak of the door went unheard. Light footsteps across the wooden deck. Down the steps. Into the dew-covered grass. A single-barrel 20-gauge lifted the same time Tig stood up. He heard the click and then the voice. “You thieving piece of—”

From behind, Jarhead wrapped a sleeper choke on the man with the shotgun. But not quick enough. An explosion lit up the dark, hollowed everyone’s eardrums. Lead dinged against the truck. Shattered the driver’s side window.

The barking dog went psychotic behind the house, whining and howling.

The man dropped the gun. Tried to stomp Jarhead’s boot with a bare foot. Reached for the arms around his neck. Scratched and dug into Jarhead’s forearms. Jarhead held tight. The fight slowed. The man went limp. Jarhead let him fall to the ground. Stepped across the yard over to the truck. Found Tig pushed up against the back tire. Moonlight beat down on his shaking body. “Goddamn that was a rush,” Tig huffed.

Dark moisture ran from Tig’s leg. Jarhead sucked air, said, “Looks like you got hit.”

“Can’t feel shit,” Tig grunted, offering a hand to Jarhead. “Pull me up. Let’s push some back road ’fore the shit gets too deep for wading.”

Behind Jarhead, the house door opened. A woman’s voice screamed back into the house, “Sarah! Sarah! Dial the county police.

They’s men out here done shot your daddy! They stealing his truck!”

Took Tig’s hand and pulled him to his feet. Reached for the gas containers. Tig said, “Give me one them sons a bitches, boy.” Jarhead helped Tig across the yard, each weighted down with a container in tow, half running toward the road where the truck sat idling. Tig laughed. “Ain’t this fun?”

The lady barefooted across the deck. Down into the yard. Found her husband while her daughter rang the police. “No!” the lady screamed. Started off behind the house. Kneeled down at the maniac dog. Said, “Grim, calm your ass down.” Unlatched the heavy chain. Said, “Now these sons a bitches gonna get theirs.”

Jarhead was restless and a bit worried. He hadn't beat on a bag since the robbery. He needed to expand his lungs. Feel some flesh give.

At the truck, Tig slung the gas into the rear. Out of breath, he told Jarhead, “You gotta drive. My leg is burgered.”
Jarhead said, “All right.” Opened the passenger’s side door. Heard steps pushing through the damp yard. Then a low growl followed by the lightning-fast roar.

Tig hollered. Fell against the truck’s bed. Tried to kick. Punched and pushed at the black German shepherd that came up on its hinds. Laid its fronts on his chest, its mouth gnawing into his right arm.

“Get this bastard off me!” He shrieked like a teething child.

With no gun, knife, or makeshift billy club, Jarhead did the only thing he knew to do. Balled his fist and punched the mauling shepherd in its head. Grim yelped, fell, and ran.

Tig lay against the truck, breathing heavily. Moisture running now from his leg and arm, smearing the side of the truck. He panted, “You about a mean son of a buck. Gonna have to buy you a few rounds.”

Jarhead helped Tig into the passenger’s side. Told him, “Don’t owe me shit.” Slammed the truck’s door. Heard the sirens coming from afar. Got in on the driver’s side.

Asked Tig, “The hell you want me to go?”

Fuel rimmed Tig’s hands and clothing, combined with the red that seeped from his peppered wounds. He laughed. “Get me to my cousin’s. He take care of me. Pay you good.”

“Just give me some damn directions. Got no idea where I’s at.”

Tig said, “Keep going down this road heading west till you see the signs for Brandenburg. Follow them.”

Jarhead stomped the gas just as the road behind him lit up.

Cans of gasoline surrounded Jarhead. He ran one hand through his sweaty locks. Thought about those lights from a few nights back. The truck’s gas pedal to the floor. The red-and-blue flashes that had opened the night. He took the back-road curves not knowing his way. But outrunning them.

Now, Jarhead stood in a rusted tin garage, a grease-smudged rotary phone held to his ear, thumbing a creased and worn picture of Tammy and the boys. He hadn’t spoken to them in days, missed the boys watching him skip rope in the dirt yard and work the heavy bag in the late evenings. They’d clap their tiny hands in amusement. After training he bathed them and tucked them into bed for sleep. Showered, then went into his bedroom, wrapped his arms around Tammy’s warm innocence.

He’d needed to let Tammy know he was okay. Make sure she and the boys were the same. Into the phone he asked, “Anyone hassle you?”

The female voice was feather-pillow-soft with worry. “Marshal Pike just wanted to know if I’d seen or heard from you. Wondered why you’d go and rob a gun shop for one grand. Not take a penny more and leave the shotgun.”

“What’d you tell him?” Jarhead asked.

Tammy said, “Last I seen you the sun was rising. The kids was crying with shitty diapers.”

Jarhead was restless and a bit worried. He hadn’t beat on a bag nor run for conditioning since the robbery. He needed to expand his lungs. Feel some flesh give. Bring some hurt. He needed to make some tracks toward Orange County. And he wasn’t real comfortable with what had happened a few nights back. Worried about the county officer he’d beat, the man he’d choked out, the cops he’d outrun. What if they’d gotten the plate number of the truck he’d fled the scene in with Tig? He told Tammy, “It’ll be over soon.”

Tammy asked, “Promise?”

“Promise. After this coming weekend I be the winner of the Donnybrook. I’ll send someone for you and the babies.”
Tig and his cousin had given him a place to rest his head, a spare room with a cot and soured sheets. In the night Jarhead heard a lot of men coming and going from the basement. But he ignored whatever it was they did besides siphoning fuel. They were his transportation to Orange County this evening.

“Why not you?” Tammy asked.

Jarhead told her, “Can’t risk being seen in or near Hazard after what I done did. I win, none of that’ll matter no way. Be more money than either of us ever did see in our lives.”

Tammy got quiet. A child sneezed in the background. She asked, “What if you don’t win? What if they’s someone meaner and tougher than you? Then what we gonna do?”

There was always a what if?. Like the first time Jarhead threw a punch. What if that man hadn’t seen him do it? Knock that other boy silly for bullying another. What if he’d not seen something in Jarhead? Taken him under his wing. Learned him how to fight. Throw a punch. An elbow. A knee. How to work his hips. Rotate and turn a fist. Where to hit and how to hit. The kidneys. The liver. Heart. How to take care of his body. Be confident, not cocky, like the man he’d never known. His real father. A marine who’d served in the Vietnam war and boxed in Puerto Rico. The man that his mother had nicknamed him after. She told him she’d left Miles before Johnny was born. That his real father, Miles Knox, spoke with the dead. Had a violent streak and a hankering for the bourbon. His mother had given him her maiden name, not his father’s.

Johnny often wondered if Miles was alive or had passed away. He’d never tried to make contact. His mother had confessed all of this to him just days before the dark cloud hit and she’d committed suicide after his stepdaddy had passed from black lung.

“Honey,” he said, “they is always someone meaner. But the smart fighter is the better fighter. I’ll win. I’ve no other choice. Then I’ll send someone for you.”

Tammy questioned once more, “You promise?”

“I done told that I did.”

“Wanna hear you say it again.”

The gloom in Tammy’s tone was killing him. He had to stay focused on their future, not her uncertain sadness.

“Promise.”

Excerpted from DONNYBROOK: A Novel by Frank Bill, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Copyright © 2013 by Frank Bill. All rights reserved.

Photo of Frank Bill by Tony Valainis

This excerpt appeared in the March 2013 issue.

Mean Streets: Evan West on His Own Indy Neighborhood

by Evan West — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 02:18:00 GMT

I was walking the cracked and crumbling sidewalk along the street where I grew up, on the near-east side of Indianapolis, with my dog, a basset hound named Roscoe, when we heard two muffled claps. Someone in the neighborhood occasionally sets off makeshift, window-rattling bombs for fun, at odd intervals throughout the day. So we’re used to bangs. But this clap-clap was different, as if a pair of heavy wooden doors had fallen flat on a bare floor. The dog stopped, perked his ears a little, and then walked on.

It was just after lunchtime on a cold Wednesday in December 2009. I had moved back into my old neighborhood a little more than a month before and had already settled into a fairly regular routine. Self-employed and working from home, I often walked Roscoe after lunch through Spades Park, a serene patchwork of grass and trees that flanks Pogue’s Run creek west of Rural Street. Or, as on that day, we would go up the street to my old house, the one my dad and mom bought nearly 40 years ago, and Roscoe would sniff around the backyard, where the sandbox and swing set used to be.

When we arrived at Dad’s, he was in his garage, rummaging around in boxes and coffee cans. My neighbor from across the way, a longtime friend named Maciej Zurawski, was there, too. A few days earlier, Maciej’s home, a quaint Arts and Crafts bungalow atop a steep hill, on an enviable double lot obscured by soaring pines, had been burglarized. He was going to install a new steel security door and came to my dad for drill bits and screws. We chatted as my dad dug through hardware. This, I thought, this is why I moved back to a neighborhood otherwise plagued by blight and crime. I had family on this street, and friends, the kind of neighbors a guy can pop in on, hit up for hardware, and, from time to time, crack a few beers with.

"People had been here most of their lives," Dad says. "Well-kept yards. Nice houses."

Maciej and I left my dad’s house together and walked across the street. He opened his gate and started to climb the long series of cement steps that led to his front door. The dog and I continued down the sidewalk. Just moments later, after walking the half-block that separates my house from Maciej’s, we heard the clap-clap. The phone buzzed in my pocket. Dad was calling. My mind jumped back to the clap-clap. Something must be wrong. I flipped open the phone and held it to my ear. Hello?

“Ev …” The pitch of my dad’s voice was urgent, and the words came fast. He was panting. “Maciej’s been shot.”

When my parents discovered this two-block section of East 16th Street in 1975, in an area known as “Brookside,” it held a lifetime of promise. A farm boy and small-town girl, the two had dated at Indiana University and then moved to Indianapolis when Dad became a public-school teacher. At a time when bank foreclosures and vacancies were still rare in this corner of the near-east side, they found a handsome, HUD-owned home in good repair, with brown siding, a broad front porch, and a big backyard. They bought the place for $8,400, moved in, married, and, in 1977, had me.

The neighborhood, a mix of well-built Craftsmans and neat bungalows with tidy green lawns, still had a lot to recommend it in those days. Most of the residents were kindly empty-nesters who had raised families here, spent their lives at good-paying factory and civil-service jobs—machinist, postman, fireman, trucker.

“I remember driving down the street and thinking, ‘Wow, this looks great,’” Mom says, recounting the first time she and Dad visited. “It looked like a mature neighborhood. It looked settled-in, stable. There was a warm, friendly feeling.”

Unlike the vast, flat grids of crowded houses in much of the inner city, this neighborhood conformed to the contours of winding Pogue’s Run and the attractive greenspaces and playgrounds along its banks, with gentle hills and curving parkways. “This tract 25 years ago was a dense forest,” wrote prominent attorney, businessman, and politician Calvin Fletcher in 1854, of what was then his working farm and rural retreat. Later, entrepreneur Michael Spades donated the acreage that would become Spades Park, and in the early 1900s, nationally renowned urban planner George Kessler took a hand in the design, with the notion that fresh air and attractive landscapes can enhance quality of life, even for modest-income families. A postcard from the era shows a gauzy, pastoral image of carriage horses trotting past a shaded brook.

And it was still a fine place to live when my parents moved in—“kind of idyllic,” says my mother. “We sat on the front porch at night, talked to neighbors who walked by.” There were two mom-and-pop corner groceries and two baseball diamonds within a few blocks of the house. A pretty blond teenager up the street, a granddaughter of the elderly couple two doors down, babysat me when I was a toddler. By the time I was 2, I had learned that whenever the widow next door was planting flowers, I could stand at the picket fence, point at her back door, and say “cookie,” and with a raspy, chain-smoking laugh, she would guide me into the kitchen, letting me reach my chubby fingers into a ceramic jar. In my early childhood, the near-east side had the trappings of a typical lower-middle-class suburb.

“It was all quiet and peaceful,” Dad says. “Good neighbors. People had been here most of their lives. Well-kept yards. Nice houses. Back then, people weren’t thinking about the neighborhood being insecure or unsafe. There just wasn’t the thought of anything bad happening.”

Police lieutenant Bill Meyers started patrolling the area after joining the force in 1963, and did so until the early ’80s. He used to sit on a porch swing across the street from Beulah’s Market, a few blocks east of my house, and sip lemonade and iced tea with the owner of the store. There wasn’t much serious crime to speak of, aside from the odd garage break-in or car theft. “It didn’t have the muggings and physical attacks a lot of other areas had,” he says. “If you heard a bang, you thought it was a firecracker.”

Even so, it was still a city neighborhood, in good ways and bad. Eccentrics found refuge here, like the man at the corner store who regaled my mom with stories of his overseas adventures as a mercenary. And Ed, the nephew of our other next-door neighbor, who seldom bathed and spent late evenings in the garage painting, smoking cigarettes, and playing loud opera on the radio.

And it was diverse. White kids, black kids, and brown kids, the poor and not-quite-as-poor—we all played and scuffled together. When a Mexican family moved onto the block, we added soccer to our sporting repertoire. We knew to avoid the kids who came, literally, from the other side of the railroad tracks—the ones that separated us from rougher neighborhoods like Brightwood and Hillside, where crime and blight had already started to take hold.

But the neighborhood did have problems. Thanks to outdated sewers, once-pastoral Pogue’s Run, the creek sentimentalized in that old postcard, reeked of shit, a running cesspool littered with tangled shopping carts and flushed condoms. And while the first phase of single-family homes had been built shortly after the turn of the century, by the 1930s investors had squeezed duplexes and triplexes into remaining lots. By the ’80s, a lot of those were showing neglect, and the renters tended to be a more transient, hardscrabble lot than the long-timers.

“I feel bad saying this, but it was almost always the renters,” Mom says. “I don’t know how many times we called the police because there was screaming over there, loud domestic disputes.” Strange neighborhood kids too young for kindergarten would show up, hungry and unsupervised, at our backyard to play, and then remain for hours. They would return day after day, for weeks, without my mom ever seeing their parents. And then one day they’d just be gone.

Five years into my parents’ homesteading, crime was already becoming more common. Nearly everyone who parked on the street had a car battery stolen, including my dad, who took to securing the hood of his Chevy with a padlock and chain.

“And then there was this one night when I got a deeply uneasy feeling,” Mom says. “It was late, and we heard dogs barking outside. We looked out the window and saw a wandering horde of what appeared to be older teens. They looked like zombies—skinny and dirty. Five or six of them. They were cussing and trying to open car doors and banging on hoods. They seemed to have a blatant disregard for whether anyone would see them or if the police would come. I remember thinking then that the neighborhood would never be the same again.”

I kept the phone to my ear and bolted back out my front door, rushing up the street toward Maciej’s front gate, where we had parted ways just moments earlier. I dialed 911, waited in the street, and then waved wildly when a firetruck appeared at the top of the block.

Firemen and EMTs rushed through the front door, and a crowd of bodies crouched over Maciej in the kitchen. The inside of the house appeared to have been ransacked. I cleared a path through the debris to make way for the gurney.

As the medics worked, Dad and I stood in the yard, surrounded by police. After hearing the gunfire, he had seen a hooded figure dash across the alley and into a neighbor’s backyard. Then he had gotten a phone call from Maciej: “Kenny, I’ve been shot.” My dad found him lying face-up on the kitchen floor. “I can’t feel my legs,” he said.

Now, the two of us watched as police congregated in a gravel parking lot by the duplexes directly across the street from Maciej’s house. In the commotion, we caught a split-second glimpse of someone running and ducking between two of the buildings. Before long, officers were gathering on one of the porches, going in with a dog, and leading a man out in handcuffs. They questioned another man in a hooded sweatshirt in the parking lot, put him in cuffs as well, and took them both away.

When I was 3, my parents divorced, and my mom moved us to Bloomington. But Dad stayed behind, in “Brown House,” as we affectionately called it, and I never really left, either. Weekends and summers were spent there, and the comparatively grittier streets of Indianapolis held a lurid attraction in my boyhood imagination. I got into fights and had my bike stolen. Rough and tumble.

In 1999, I graduated college right as the house next to my dad’s went vacant. The opera-listening neighbor had carried on there after his elderly aunt died, one of the last links to the neighborhood’s old guard, and his departure marked the first time the home had been vacant in decades. Dad bought it for $10,000 and taught me the rudiments of renovation. After clearing out the garbage and dead roaches, I moved in.

A couple of years later, I decided to relocate to a new house in a recently gentrified area north of downtown. In the meantime, I had become pals with the boyfriend of a co-worker at Indianapolis Monthly, a bohemian Polish national named Maciej who shared my far-flung curiosity and love of outdoor adventure. He needed a place to live, so my dad and I rented him the little house we’d fixed up on my old block.

The neighborhood was showing wear by then, but also signs of improvement. First-time homebuyers and speculators, encouraged by easy mortgages and downtown redevelopment, installed new siding and fresh carpets and sold houses for double what they’d paid. When the home across the street went up for sale, the one on the hill with the trees and big lot, Maciej bought it.

Another house I admired on the street became available, one facing the park, with picture windows and hardwood floors, and I invested there as well, thinking it might someday be as attractive to urban pioneers as it was to me. Dad and I bought three more properties nearby in quick succession, one of them at the other end of the block, and fixed them up.

“The outside perception of the neighborhood was always worse than how I perceived it,” Dad says. “People I worked with would say, ‘You live there?’ And I’d always say, ‘It’s not as bad as you think.’”

As we marveled at how cheap the houses were, and that each property we bought cost less than the last, it probably should have occurred to us that we were sledding on a downhill market. So many properties were available that the owners—primarily banks that had taken possession in foreclosure—had to sell them cheap to unload them, often to investors like us.

As the 2000s wore on, entire blocks became rental slums. Not a quarter-mile from where my dad lived, a street where two of our rental houses were located rapidly went to hell: A crack house next to one of them was serving a former grocery-turned-flophouse nearby and a whorehouse a few doors down. The first tenant we had after fixing up the place, a young single mother, had her door kicked down shortly after moving in. The robbers held her at gunpoint until she convinced them she had neither drugs nor money.

Dad and I went home and waited for Detective Peter Perkins to take our statements. We agreed to meet him back at Maciej’s house later that evening, to let him in for a look at the crime scene.

It was past nightfall when we returned to the house. Maciej’s new security door was laid out on a picnic table in the backyard. Inside, we saw the debris of the day scattered across the floor of every room, as if the house had been lifted from the foundation, given a quick shake, and then placed back atop its cinderblocks. In the kitchen, cold air blew in through a broken window.

From what Detective Perkins could gather, Maciej had walked in on two burglars, and one of them shot him, most likely with the .40-caliber semi-automatic Ruger handgun police found outside the window. One slug tore straight through the soft tissue of Maciej’s right arm, and another slammed into his back and stayed there. The police had found the two suspects in one of the du-plexes across the street; a police dog sniffed out one of them hiding in the attic. He had a deep gash across the bridge of his nose, probably from scrambling through the shattered kitchen window. When he was found, the suspect asked “if that guy who was shot had died,” according to the police. They also found foreign coins and a laptop computer that likely had come from Maciej’s house.

In the middle of the kitchen floor, on the beige vinyl tiles, was a tight pool of thick, black blood. After Detective Perkins left, we secured a board over the window and quietly wiped it up. We didn’t want Maciej’s girlfriend to see it when she came to collect belongings he would need in the hospital.

This last time I decided to move back to the neighborhood, in 2009, I was sanguine at the prospect. I had come to realize that I bought the house on my old street—the one facing the park, with the picture windows and hardwood floors—not so much because it was a good investment, but because I loved it. I began to daydream about sitting on the front-porch swing in the morning, sipping coffee and gazing at the white sycamores and flowering redbuds across the park. I downplayed the encroaching decay. It seemed as though this two-block stretch, at least, was clinging to stability. So I sold the gentrified place north of downtown, and my girlfriend and I packed up and moved east.

We set up housekeeping in mid-November. On December 23, two days before Christmas, I was cleaning up my friend’s blood.

Afterward, my outlook was darker. Since I’d moved away and returned, conditions in the neighborhood had taken a desperate turn. I just hadn’t wanted to admit it. The vacant houses had multiplied, and no one was fixing them up. Scrap thieves, after ripping away the aluminum siding and carting off air-conditioners, were now breaking down doors and scouring interiors for plumbing, wiring, and even the iron weights inside antique double-hung windows.

Maciej didn't know there was another man in the house, behind him. A deafening blast rang against the walls.

“It is heartrending to go through there now and see, remembering what it was,” says Lieutenant Meyers, the cop who patrolled the neighborhood as a young officer all those years ago. “It has really, really changed, like a blight came through. It looks like a war zone.” This is what years of suburban flight left behind, he says, after the children of the old folks who had planted fruit trees in neighborhoods like these left to sow seeds in newly turned dirt outside of the inner city.

At the time of the shooting, the local high school, Arsenal Tech, was routinely graduating less than half its students, class after class of young people with no viable prospects for the future and little to do but look for opportunities to commit crime. The idle, scruffy men wandering the streets, a nuisance before, now seemed menacing—together with the kicked-in doors, busted windows, and burned-out houses around me, it all resembled the landscape of Mad Max, with roving bandits picking the last shreds of flesh from a charred carcass. “It’s almost like they’re frantic,” says Dad.

“I drove through after you first moved back and had this really sad feeling about the neighborhood,” says Mom. “That something tragic had happened to it. That it was lost.”

I installed security doors and an alarm.

After the shooting, Detective Perkins asked me to meet him and a crime-scene specialist at Maciej’s house.

The detective walked through the particulars of the incident. He stood in the hallway leading out of the back bedroom and faced the kitchen, and then held up his arm, index finger and thumb extended, and fired an imaginary shot at the now-boarded window. He explained that the shell casings would have been ejected off to the right of the pistol, and then he looked down at the detritus underfoot. “Maciej wasn’t much of a housekeeper, was he?” he said. I handed him a yardstick, and he poked around.

“Aha,” the detective said, reaching with a gloved hand to pick out the little brass tube from the mess on the floor. “The shooter might have left a fingerprint on here.”

Next, the three of us pried at the stove, where Dad and I had found a bullet hole. We lifted off the sheet metal until the exit point was exposed. Squinting, the technician peered into the guts of the oven, reached in, and removed a flattened projectile.

A call came in to Detective Perkins. He held the cell phone to his ear and looked at me while nodding and shaking his head at the voice on the other end of the line. “Uh-huh. Yeah. Permanent injury. Uh-huh. Okay.” He put the phone back in his pocket. “That was from the hospital,” he said. “They say Maciej is going to be paralyzed.”

I had regular visits with Maciej at Wishard and Community East hospitals, as he struggled to recover from his injuries. He had arrived with three shattered vertebrae, a collapsed lung, and a neat round hole—almost exactly the diameter of a .40-caliber bullet—that went straight through his upper right arm. Doctors showed him the MRI, and he could see the slug under the skin, and bone fragments, and waves of tissue damage radiating outward from the entry wound, as though he’d been hit square in the back with a sledgehammer.

Maciej, now 44, remembers the day vividly. He had left me and walked into his house, noticing that the French doors separating the living room from the side bedroom were ajar. The bedroom had been ransacked, the mattress tossed. He heard a noise in the kitchen. As he stepped into the hallway, a stranger was standing right there, not six feet away. The man leapt headfirst through a closed window. It exploded in a cascade of glass. Thinking this must have been the burglar who’d hit his house a few days before, Maciej lunged and grabbed the man’s ankles, and the intruder teetered on the bottom edge of the window frame, half inside and half out.

Maciej didn’t know there was another man in the house, behind him. A deafening blast rang against the walls. Just before blacking out, Maciej thought for an instant that he might have been shot in the head, until he noticed there was no blood splattered on the wall in front of him. He came to a split-second later, midway through collapsing on the floor, and smelled gunpowder—not from the first shot, he now knows, but from the second shot, which hit his arm. He felt searing pain in his back, and as he lay on the floor watching the second burglar jump out the window, he tried to struggle and kick. That’s when he realized his legs wouldn’t move.

“Hiking the Appalachian Trail—I know that ain’t gonna happen,” he says. “But at least my head wasn’t blown off.” Getting over the idea that he won’t ever hike again is easier than it was in the first year after his injury. “I miss it, but not as bad as I did,” he says. “I guess you forget over time.”

As Maciej recovered, the wheels of justice turned—slowly. Neither of the men charged with the crime, Terry Laderson and Terrance Turner, both 19, lived in the neighborhood. Evidently they had come to visit a young woman renting the duplex where the police had apprehended them.

Terry Landerson, 22, is serving a 45-year prison sentence for the crime he committed on my street. He says he picked up his first handgun, a .22-caliber Beretta—"something small"—when he was a freshman at Broad Ripple High School. He bought it on the street for $30.

One of the suspects, Turner, had a warrant out for his arrest, for burglary and theft, issued a month before the break-in on my street. He had a previous arrest for theft, receiving stolen property, and carrying a handgun without a license. The police monitored the phone calls of Laderson, the suspect who had hidden in the attic, in Marion County Jail and overheard him talking to his mother. “They found the missile, Mama,” he had said. According to Detective Perkins, in criminal parlance “missile” means gun.

After a year, the man who had hidden in the attic agreed to a plea: The prosecutor dropped the charge of attempted murder, and in exchange Laderson copped to felony burglary and illegal possession of a handgun. But he wouldn’t implicate the other defendant. At an emotional sentencing hearing, in February 2011, Maciej’s father, in precise but heavily accented English, recounted moving his family from communist Poland to America as political refugees, with dreams of opportunity for his son. The defendant’s grandfather also took the stand. He said that Laderson hadn’t “been in much trouble, any trouble, before this terrible day,” and then looked out at the gallery and apologized for what his grandson had done.

Laderson sat impassively at a table, next to his attorney, in the center of the courtroom. He looked small and alone. And young. The judge sentenced him to 45 years, and a bailiff led him away. Justice prevailed. But it was difficult to feel satisfied.

Turner, the second defendant, held out as court dates were scheduled, rescheduled, and rescheduled again. (In the interim, one of the prosecution’s witnesses, a woman who had lived on my street when the shooting occurred, was arrested for murder in connection with a liquor-store robbery.) The judge in the case eventually acquitted Turner for lack of evidence. A month later, a different judge gave him an eight-year sentence for robbery and burglary, crimes committed before Maciej’s shooting.

The chapel in the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility’s maximum-security wing, near Terre Haute, is a smallish room with gray carpet and white-painted cinderblock walls. Terry Laderson, the man convicted of burglarizing my friend’s home, walks in. He is two years into his 45-year sentence, which, with good behavior, should come out to about 20 years.

Laderson has just left the segregation unit—the “hole,” he calls it—for what he describes as a misunderstanding with a guard. He is wearing slippers and, under his khaki jumpsuit, a white long-john top with tattered sleeves. We shake hands, and then sit facing one another across a table placed in the center of the room. A large wooden cross hangs on the wall behind him. He looks at me inquisitively, a little nervous.

Maciej is a friend of mine, I say. I am writing a story about what happened and need to hear both sides of the story. I want to keep an open mind. He says that is okay.

What was his childhood like? He never met his father, he says, his mother was on drugs, and he lived in foster care until he was 4. Then he went to stay with his grandparents, along with siblings, uncles, an aunt, and a cousin, in the couple’s modest home on the near-north side of Indianapolis. His grandfather works at the unemployment office, and his grandmother stays at home. They go to church.

I tell him that I saw a handwritten letter in his court file, the one he sent to the judge expressing his intentions to file an appeal over his sentence. Is he an artist? The script was precise and stylized—elegant. “Yeah, all through my life, people told me I could write real good,” he says. “I can draw and stuff.”

“When I was in school, I had good grades,” he continues. But around the time he got into middle school, at Shortridge, bad influences from his neighborhood became a bigger priority. His friends were dealing crack. He started smoking marijuana and, eventually, dealing it. When Laderson was in seventh grade, his cousin took a bullet while committing an armed robbery and went to prison, and for Laderson, hearing shots ring out at parties came to be fairly routine. He got his first gun while he was a freshman at Broad Ripple High, “something small,” a .22-caliber Beretta pistol he picked up on the street for $30. One time, when he was 16, he was standing at the end of his street, and someone rolled by in a pickup and opened fire on him, a next-door neighbor, and an older friend of his uncle’s. A blast of buckshot sprayed his face and legs. Recounting the episode, Laderson reaches to his chin and starts feeling around with his finger. One of the pellets is still in there, he says.

From then on, Laderson wanted to carry a gun nearly all the time. By his sophomore year, he was going to school less and less. He got caught skipping class and ran to the bathroom, a stunt that got him slapped with a charge of resisting law enforcement. He dropped out early in his junior year.

Laderson worked briefly at a couple of jobs, at UPS and Goodwill, but mostly just rode around with friends, smoked pot, and dealt drugs. In 2009, a friend from his neighborhood, Lindsay Johnson, moved into a duplex on the near-east side. He’d never spent much time in the area, he says, but he started dropping by.

On December 23, he was hanging out at Johnson’s place with another friend of his from the neighborhood where he grew up, whom he identifies only as “Little D.” Johnson wasn’t there, but a third man was: Terrance Turner, another friend of hers whom Laderson says he didn’t really know.

“Let’s just go burglarize somebody,” said Little D. Laderson had never committed a burglary before, he says, but he didn’t object to Little D’s proposal. “I was being a follower,” he admits, shaking his head. Laderson and Little D singled out a house across the street, the one high up on the hill, with all the trees. They slipped through the gate, walked around to the back, and banged on the door. No one answered. So they climbed in through a window.

A short time later, Laderson was rifling through dressers in the back bedroom when he heard a commotion. He stepped out into the hallway and saw a strange man running through the kitchen toward Little D, who was trying to escape through the window. Laderson panicked. The Ruger was already out. He raised it and “started shooting.”

“Why did I just do that?” he thought as he bounded through the window. He still has a prominent scar on the bridge of his nose from the jagged glass.

Laderson felt the gun fall to the ground under the window, his adrenaline pumping too fast to stop and pick it up. He just wanted to run. He just wanted to get out of there.

He ran down the alley, across backyards, and into a vacant house, but popped back out when he saw some people outside. By then, the police had drawn a perimeter around the neighborhood. Squad cars parked at intersections, lights flashing. He doubled back to the duplex, and, he says, Turner let him inside. He climbed into the attic and waited.

Fifteen minutes passed. He heard the police downstairs. He heard them leave. Then he heard them again. This time they had a dog.

Terry Laderson has had one nagging thought, over and over, a refrain, since that day when he entered my friend’s home and shot him: “Why did I do that?”

He also thinks about what he will do after his sentence is up, when he will be a man in his 40s. He wants to get a high-school degree in prison, and then work a regular job when he’s out. For now, he reads—the Bible helps him stay out of trouble—and plays basketball. He says the time in county jail brought him closer to his mother, the one who was absent most of his life. But after two years in state prison, he has had only one visitor: me.

Laderson maintains that Turner, the second defendant, wasn’t involved. He won’t identify the man who was, the mysterious Little D, because snitching “could make it real hard” on him in prison. If other inmates found out, “I could get stabbed.”

"Why did I just do that?" he thought as he bounded through the window. He still has a scar on his nose from the glass.

But Laderson does regret that he never told Maciej he is sorry. Until just before the sentencing, he had planned to address the court. He had a prepared statement. But he decided against it at the last minute. He was ashamed that his family had to be there to defend him. Explaining her sentencing decision, the judge in Laderson’s case cited his apparent lack of remorse.

“How’s he doing, though?” Laderson asks now of Maciej. “Is he all right?”

I’m not sure how to answer. Maciej used to go on weeklong hiking trips. He used to drive. He used to take out his own trash.

“He’s doing better”—and I add that he couldn’t live in his house after the incident.

“Why is that?” Laderson asks.

“It wasn’t real accessible for a wheelchair,” I say. “He was down for a while, but his spirits seem to be quite a bit better now.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he says.

“I guess nothing really good came out of it on either side, did it?” I say.

“No,” he says. “Not at all.”

In the three years since my move back to the near-east side, coping with crime has become a way of life.

When my rental house at the other end of the block went vacant, I twice caught “Charles,” a semi-homeless man who lived in the rundown garage next door, stealing electricity by running an extension cord to an external outlet on the rental. He pushes around a cart with various and sundry used items—tools, building materials, knickknacks—asking if there’s anything you’d like to buy. When a new tenant took up residence in the property, he was burglarized within a couple of days: Someone climbed through a window and stole his computer while he was walking his dog. Since then, nearly every decoration he’s placed around the lawn has disappeared. Last spring, several large potted houseplants disappeared from my front porch. A couple of days later, the tenant up the street confirmed that “Charles” had tried to sell him some potted plants the day after mine went missing.

Neighbors on all sides of me—left, right, and behind—have had their homes burglarized, as have many of the rest of the resi-dents on my street. A few blocks away, the man whose father ran Beulah’s Market—the store Lieutenant Meyers remembers from sipping lemonade in the old days—has had his TV stolen four times. On each occasion, thieves smashed the glass in his back door, grabbed the TV as the alarm blared, and hightailed it away before the police arrived. Up the block from me, the cops raid suspected drug houses every few months. After periods of relative quiet, we can tell when one has opened for business again, because men with dirty jeans stride purposefully through the park and down the street toward it. When authorities rounded up suspected members of the Outlaws biker gang last year, I found out that one of the men indicted lives on my street as well. And he is among the neighborhood’s solid homeowners, someone I wave to when he’s standing in his front yard.

Commander James Waters, who heads up the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department’s East District, explains that the cops are doing the best they can with limited manpower. “We’re so shorthanded, I can’t leave [officers] there,” he says. “They have to move on to the next fire.”

Still, he says crime prevention is a priority. After a spike in burglaries last year, he had “neighborhood reconnaissance officers” go door-to-door in my area and encourage residents to report suspicious activity. Such initiatives might have contributed to the 2 percent decrease in break-ins reported in the district since 2011. In my immediate area, though, at least a half-dozen burglary calls came in during the first month of this year; there’s no telling what that number could have been without the IMPD’s extra efforts.

The commander also arranged for me to go on a ride-along with one of the officers who patrols my street, part of a police zone known as “The Tens,” which stretches south from 25th Street to near Pogue’s Run. After eight hours in a squad car with a laconic young policeman named Kollin, who wrestled a belligerent drunk to the ground and settled an in-home dispute with an unruly teenager, I figured out that my neighborhood was not of particular interest. Not because the officer didn’t care, but because he didn’t have time to lament one little enclave that turned upside down. He never saw the way it used to be. Mine is just one bad neighborhood among many.

“It’s like society is letting things go,” he told me at the end of the shift. “You asked me before why I became a police officer. It was to help people, to catch the bad guy.” He went quiet for a moment. “Now I just want to make it home every night.”

After our interview, my dad called me later in the evening. An important question hadn’t been raised, one that’s probably obvious to anyone who drives through our neighborhood or reads this story.

Why in the hell would you stay there?

Dad noted that he had Brown House completely paid off sometime in the 1980s. No payment for the past 30 years, which allowed him to retire earlier than if he’d bought a more expensive home elsewhere. (My house payment is less than half what it was at the gentrified place.) And could we even find takers if we tried to sell our houses, anyway?

This despite what else Dad told me earlier, that since the shooting, he can’t leave on RV trips, a perk of early retirement, without worrying that someone in the neighborhood might be watching him and then, after he’s gone, climb through a window.

Which leads me to believe that something more than affordability keeps us here, despite our fear that this place we’ve called home for so long might never bounce back. Maybe we’re clinging to the way it used to be. Maybe we’re just stubborn. Or maybe it’s the feeling that if we were to give up on this corner of Indianapolis, where my life began, and where my father helped raise his only son, it might finally be beyond hope.

Evan West is executive editor of this magazine. See his bio here.

Some photos by Tony Valainis

This article appeared in the March 2013 issue.

Indy's 10 Most Notorious Criminals of All Time

by Sam Stall — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:56:00 GMT

[1] 16-Year-Old Sylvia Likens Tortured, Killed by Caregiver

In 1965, Gertrude Baniszewski was hired to look after sisters Sylvia and Jenny Likens, ages 16 and 15. Baniszewski and her daughter Paula (below), along with some neighborhood kids, took a pathological dislike to Sylvia, harassing and locking her in the basement of their eastside home, where they tortured her until she died on October 26, 1965. The condition of the girl’s frail body—“I’m a prostitute” was etched into her stomach—and horrific courtroom testimony might have won the Baniszewskis a trip to death row. Instead, they got “life.” Gertrude left prison in 1985. Paula wound up in Iowa with a new name, working as a teacher’s aide.

[2] Angry Landowner Holds Mortgage Broker Hostage

Small-time businessman Tony Kiritsis convinced himself that Richard O. Hall, an executive at Indianapolis-based Meridian Mortgage Company, had cheated him in a land deal. So on February 8, 1977, he burst into Meridian’s downtown offices, wired a shotgun to Hall’s neck, and staged a 63-hour hostage standoff, much of it broadcast on live TV. He gave up after being told that he’d get an apology, immunity from prosecution, and a large sum of money. (He only received the apology.) Kiritsis was acquitted by reason of insanity, spent a decade in a mental institution, and was back on the street in 1998. He died a free man in 2005. [See "The End of the Line" for a full account of Kiritsis's crime.]

[3] Bodies Unearthed on Property of Westfield Businessman

It seemed Herb Baumeister was a respectable citizen and family man. But it was a cover for his other identity: serial killer. The Sav-A-Lot owner liked to cruise gay bars, take men back to his palatial Hamilton County home, murder them, and then hide the corpses on the property’s 18 wooded acres. Acting on a tip from a man claiming to have escaped Baumeister’s home unscathed, police searched the grounds in 1996 and discovered the skeletal remains of 11 males. Only four of the men have ever been identified. Baumeister drove to Canada and shot himself before the authorities could prosecute him.

[4] Heavyweight Champ Convicted of Raping Beauty-Pageant Contestant

Fearsome boxer Mike Tyson got coldcocked by justice after he was accused, in 1991, of raping a Miss Black America hopeful in his downtown Canterbury Hotel suite. The highly publicized trial resulted in a sentence of six years for three counts: one for rape and two for criminal deviant conduct. A model prisoner, Tyson served only three years total (in accommodations far more spartan than the Canterbury).

[5] Powerful Klan Leader Outed as Sex Offender

In the early 1920s, D.C. Stephenson was the law in Indiana. Leader of the state’s Ku Klux Klan network, he helped elect dozens of politicians, including Governor Edward L. Jackson. It all came apart in 1925, when Stephenson was charged with abducting, raping, and causing the death of a young woman who’d poisoned herself while the two were at a hotel in Hammond—and whom a Stephenson associate, on boss’s orders, dropped off at her Irvington home without medical care. Stephenson (pictured at the top of this article) got a life sentence, and when the governor wouldn’t grant a pardon, the convict spilled his guts about backroom dealings, effectively destroying the state Klan and several political careers.

[6] Deadly Love Triangle Ensnares Eli Lilly Exec

Husband, father, and Eli Lilly vice president Forrest Teel appeared to be the very model of 1950s propriety. That is, until his mistress, former company employee Connie Nicholas, discovered that Teel was cheating on her as well. In 1958, Nicholas surprised him in his car outside the second mistress’s apartment on East 38th Street and pumped a few slugs into him. In a splashy trial that was covered in Life magazine, the jury found Nicholas (pictured at the top of this article) guilty of only voluntary manslaughter after buying her assertion that the gun went off accidentally. Four times.

[7] Millionairess Robbed and Killed in Northside Home

Eccentric northside widow Marjorie Jackson, whose late husband had been heir to the former Standard Grocery chain, stashed a considerable fortune around her house on Spring Mill Road. When word of the pile got out, a cast of unsavory characters lined up to make some unauthorized withdrawals. The first heist nabbed close to $2 million, and then, on May 7, 1977, bandits took Jackson’s life as well as her loot, shooting her dead in the kitchen and running off with approximately $3 million more. The killer, Howard “Billy Joe” Willard, and his accomplice, Manuel Lee Robinson, were quickly apprehended by the authorities. But it is thought that several million dollars of Jackson’s riches remain unaccounted for to this day.

[8] Four Dead in Burger Chef Murders

On November 18, 1978, the four-person night staff at a Burger Chef in Speedway simply vanished. Days later, their bodies turned up in Johnson County. Two had been shot, one stabbed, and the other beaten until he choked on his own blood. More than three decades have passed, yet the perpetrators are still unknown. The restaurant was relieved of a paltry $581, but some theorize the motive was more than robbery. Only the killers know. And they aren’t talking.

[9] Grocer's Wife Suspected in Bizarre Double Homicide

In September 1868, the bodies of Jacob and Nancy Jane Young were discovered along White River, riddled with gunshots. A tangled investigation fingered Nancy Clem, an unassuming grocer’s wife allegedly involved in loan-sharking. Despite evidence placing her at the scene of the “Cold Spring murders” (and prosecution by future president Benjamin Harrison), Clem weathered five trials and got only four years in jail—for perjury and forgery

[10] Serial Killer Spreads Murder Spree to Irvington

When the World’s Fair came to Chicago in 1893, Herman W. Mudgett—alias H.H. Holmes—built a “hotel” near the grounds. It was, in fact, a murder factory, with secret rooms, gas lines for asphyxiating victims, and basement furnaces for burning bodies. When neighbors grew concerned, Holmes went on the lam to an Irvington cottage, where he killed again—a boy whose mother entrusted him to Holmes’s “care” after he promised to enroll the child in a good school. A detective from Philadelphia, where Holmes had once been jailed for fraud, later found the remains. Holmes confessed to 27 murders. Now known as “America’s First Serial Killer,” he was hanged in 1896.

Dishonorable Mention: High-Flying "Financier" Bilks Thousands

Tim Durham liked to throw money around. Big parties. Lavish homes. Hefty donations to Indiana GOP candidates. But the money the Indianapolis con man spent wasn’t his. Durham’s leveraged-buyout firm, Obsidian Enterprises, located on Monument Circle, and its subsidiary, Ohio-based Fair Finance, were in fact an elaborate Ponzi scheme that relieved roughly 5,000 investors of more than $200 million. The party—believed to be the largest case of corporate fraud in Indiana history—ended on November 24, 2009, with an FBI raid. The 50-year-old Durham got 50 years in the pokey on November 30, 2012.

Stephenson, Baniszewski, and Tyson photos courtesy Indiana State Archives; Nicholas photo by Michael Rougier/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images; Durham photo by Tony Valainis.

This article appeared in the March 2013 issue.

Our Gangster: John Dillinger

by Evan West — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 02:36:00 GMT

Editor’s Note, March 27, 2013: The following article originally appeared in the July 2004 issue of IM. In 2009, actor Johnny Depp played Dillinger in the movie Public Enemies, about the Indiana desperado’s notorious Depression-era crime spree. Earlier this month, the Indianapolis International Airport announced plans to display Dillinger’s 1933 Essex Terraplane.

The death cult began on July 22, 1934, when FBI agents gunned down John Dillinger outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater. As word spread that the most notorious bank robber of the Depression era was dead, people flocked to the scene and used handkerchiefs to sop up his blood. Thousands filed into the basement of the Chicago morgue to view his corpse, which was propped up for display. Law-enforcement officers posed proudly with his remains. Photos of his lifeless face, torso, and blanketed body ran front-page on newspapers across the country.

Back in Indiana, Dillinger’s family announced a false funeral time to mislead the throngs. By the time they saw their fallen relative, much of his facial hair had been pulled away by plaster casts that souvenir-seekers had made of his face; now, those original death masks, one of which J. Edgar Hoover is said to have kept in his office for years, are the holy grails of Dillingerdom. After Dillinger’s casket was lowered into the ground at Crown Hill Cemetery, the grave was filled with concrete to deter the morbidly curious; over the years, his headstone has been replaced several times because visitors chip off pieces to take home as keepsakes. The gravesite is one of only a dozen—including the resting places of a president, a senator, and three vice presidents—highlighted on Crown Hill’s tour maps.

America’s early fascination with Dillinger, beginning with his whirlwind crime spree of 1933 and ’34, was a product of the times. But as the Great Depression gave way to World War II and the baby boom, Dillinger remained an icon. In 1936 Humphrey Bogart got one of his first big breaks playing a gangster based on Dillinger in the movie Petrified Forest; Bogie is said to have watched Dillinger newsreels to prepare for the part and probably owes much of his early success to the flamboyant criminal. Since his death, Dillinger has inspired scores of movies, documentaries and books, and at least two museums.

In Indiana, Dillinger’s legacy is even more intense. If he’s not the prodigal son of the Hoosier family, he’s certainly the most beloved black sheep, a gunman who became a folk hero who became a legend, whose exploits are exaggerated and improvised with each telling. Ask around, and folks will tell you that their dad, grandpa, or uncle drank a beer with Dillinger, saw him leave a hideout, or stood by while he held up a bank. For good or ill, Indiana still identifies with John Dillinger. And decades after his death, we refuse to let him die.

Born in 1903, John Herbert Dillinger grew up in a middle-class neighborhood on what is now the near-eastside of Indianapolis. His father, John Sr., was a grocer. His mother, Mollie, died when he was 3. Notwithstanding the early loss of his mother, Dillinger had, by most accounts, a normal turn-of-the-century boyhood, attending public schools, tussling with other boys in the neighborhood, and swimming in Fall Creek. It’s possible that the worst thing he did as a child was steal coal from railcars and sell it to neighbors.

When Dillinger was 9, his father remarried; when he was 17, the family moved to a farm in Mooresville, which would forever after be known as Dillinger’s hometown. While he’s said to have gotten on well with his stepmother and half-siblings, in young adulthood Dillinger left the farm often, seeking out the relatively greater excitement of nearby Martinsville, the county seat, where he was a star on the baseball team and a regular in the pool halls. After a brief stint in the Navy, he married at 21.

Rather than settle down, however, Dillinger fell in with a local ne’er-do-well and ex-con, Ed Singleton. It was Singleton who helped him plan his first robbery. On the evening of September 6, 1924, as a Mooresville grocer named Frank Morgan carried the day’s proceeds to the town bank, Dillinger attacked him with a heavy iron bolt wrapped in cloth, then turned a gun on him. But Dillinger, reportedly drunk, botched the holdup. Morgan grabbed the gun, Dillinger fled, the deputy sheriff tracked him down two days later, and Dillinger’s father, known as an honest man and devout churchgoer, convinced his son to confess to the crime. The prosecutor assured young Dillinger he didn’t need a lawyer because he’d admitted his guilt and the judge would let him off easy.

Instead, the judge, regarded as the toughest in the county, made an example of Dillinger by handing down an unusually long sentence of 10 to 20 years. Singleton, the more-experienced accomplice, wisely sought legal counsel and received only two. Dillinger spent the next nine years of his life stewing in prison, first in the Indiana State Reformatory in Pendleton and later in the tougher Michigan City State Prison.

Believing that he’d been duped by the prosecutor and received an unfair sentence, Dillinger, while incarcerated, demonstrated the same healthy disregard for authority that would eventually make him a household name. Prison records show that in the first two years of his sentence he was disciplined for “hiding out,” “gambling,” “disorderly conduct,” “fighting,” “destroying property,” “attempt escape,” and “crookedness.” In a letter to the warden, his sister, Audrey Hancock, explained that “John at heart is not a bad boy, and is doing time someone else ought to be doing. That is why he has been so dissatisfied and as we all know, has not been as obedient as he might have been.” While he was in jail, Dillinger’s wife divorced him, and he met the seasoned criminals who would later form the nucleus of his gang. His stepmother died just an hour before he returned home.

Dillinger would never forgive the legal system for giving him a bad rap and, in his mind, taking the best years of his life. “I know I have been a big disappointment to you,” he later wrote to his father, “but I guess I did to [sic] much time for where I went in a carefree boy I came out bitter toward everything in general. Of course Dad most of the blame lies with me for my environment was of the best but if I had gotten off more leniently when I made my first mistake this would never have happened.”

Within a month of returning to Mooresville in May 1933, Dillinger hooked up with a group of small-time hoods in Indianapolis and started committing robberies. Over time, he and an evolving cadre of gang members graduated from knocking over groceries and pharmacies to hitting banks and police armories, pulling off a string of brazen robberies around Indiana and the upper Midwest. He helped organize a massive jailbreak, freeing his old prison buddies from Michigan City to join his gang. They, in turn, would later free Dillinger from a small-town jail in Lima, Ohio—where he had landed after authorities picked him up while he visited a girlfriend in Dayton—and kill the local sheriff in the process. The gang’s proficiency and moxie propelled its nominal leader to the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list. By 1934, Dillinger was Public Enemy Number One and the biggest news story in America.

Of course, not everyone viewed Dillinger as an enemy. Hoosiers, mired in the depths of the Great Depression, faced massive unemployment, frequent bank closures, widespread property foreclosure, and government corruption. In that climate of hatred for financial institutions and mistrust of government, Dillinger, who made his living by sticking it to the establishment—raiding depositories and defying the law with impunity—was a largely sympathetic character.

“Nowadays, you’d be pissed because he was stealing your money,” says Randy Pinkston, a Fishers resident whose father was an early Dillinger expert. “But in the Depression you couldn’t get your money out of the bank, so everybody hated the banks more than they hated him.” To people beaten down by financial desperation, Dillinger was a heroic figure, and many a man on the street was happy to call the Hoosier bandit one of his own, despite the fact that most of the money he stole belonged, even if indirectly, to the people of Indiana. “Hurray for you, John,” read a letter published in one Indiana paper. “May you never be caught!”

Even if you didn’t approve of Dillinger’s livelihood, it was hard to resist his flair and the almost infectious zeal he brought to his chosen profession. A star of newspapers and newsreels, he took pride in being a bank robber, wearing tailored wool suits, a cocked fedora, and a jaunty mustache. He favored fast, flashy cars and pretty, streetwise women. Bystanders and bank tellers often found themselves liking the guy because he was generally polite, charming, and funny. His trademark maneuver of vaulting over bank guardrails would have made Douglas Fairbanks proud. When he found it necessary to inconvenience people during a getaway—say, by kidnapping them and using them as human shields—he papered them with looted cash. On the rare occasions when he was in custody of the law, he was chummy with jailers and cooperative with reporters.

“People would always talk about how polite John was, even in very negative encounters,” says Pinkston. “There was never any cursing, throwing people around, or unnecessary violence. He was a businessman. He knew he was there to rob a bank and not make it anything more than a bank robbery.”

Even when the nationwide manhunt for Dillinger was at its hottest, he found time to visit his family in Mooresville, which the media would then report to an admiring public several days later. “As odd as it sounds, he held true to some pretty decent family values,” says Pinkston. As Dillinger ran wild, the public read about his exploits from the perspective of his concerned kinfolk back on the farm, who always maintained that their Johnnie was a good boy turned bad by an unfair system. Theirs was a dramatic family saga played out on a national stage.

Though he’d dropped out of high school, Dillinger was smart enough to have outwitted state and local authorities for months before allegedly killing a police officer in the course of an East Chicago robbery, then heading cross-country to hide out in Arizona, where Tucson police apprehended him in January 1934. The nation’s newspapers had painted Dillinger’s crime spree as a failing of Indiana law enforcement, and Governor Paul McNutt, who’d signed Dillinger’s parole papers only a few months earlier, must have breathed a sigh of relief when the outlaw, mugging for the cameras, stepped onto an airport tarmac in Chicago en route to his arraignment on homicide charges in Crown Point.

Just three weeks after Dillinger’s court appearance, however, McNutt awoke to the news that the bandit had made a daring escape from the Lake County Jail using a fake wooden pistol. A storm of letters soon flooded McNutt’s office. All over the country, angry correspondents clipped and sent in articles about the jailbreak; the tenor of their letters was that Indiana and, by implication, its governor were responsible for unleashing Dillinger’s lawless fury on the American public. “In many states outside of Indiana, Hoosier blood is boiling,” wrote one Charles C. Pettijohn, a lawyer in New York. “I hope that you clean house out there in no uncertain terms ... The eyes of the nation are focused on you.”

For the remainder of his term, McNutt kept every abusive letter and embarrassing article in a special Dillinger file. He seems to have realized that despite all the challenges he’d faced, his administration—indeed, the state of Indiana during his tenure—had been defined by the exploits of a single cocky gangster in a well-cut suit.

Meanwhile, back on the loose in early 1934 after escaping from Crown Point, Dillinger was busy building his legend. While authorities scoured several states to find him, he joined five gang members and their molls in a Wisconsin resort called Little Bohemia to “cool off.” When the feds received a tip that the Dillinger crew was holed up there, they quietly approached the lakeside compound and, mistakenly thinking the gang was wise to them and trying to escape, shot up a car full of innocent resort patrons. When Dillinger and the gang heard the noise, they came out blazing. What ensued was, though brief, one of the most famous shootouts in U.S. history, on par with the St. Valentine’s Day massacre and the showdown at OK Corral. All of Dillinger’s men escaped; one federal agent and an innocent bystander were killed.

Though the ambush in Chicago cut short Dillinger’s crime spree and meteoric rise to fame, it sealed his reputation as one of the great bank robbers of all time. And his untimely, violent death made him an idol.

After trying to alter his fingerprints with acid, Dillinger went under the knife for crude plastic surgery to change his more recognizable facial features—the dimpled chin, the moles, the scar on his lip. He began the sultry summer of 1934 on the lam in Chicago, going to movies with his girlfriend, Polly Hamilton, and generally keeping a low profile. It was the movies, however—and Hamilton’s friend, Anna Sage—that would prove Dillinger’s undoing. Sage had tipped off the feds that on the evening of July 22 she, Hamilton, and Dillinger would be attending Manhattan Melodrama, a gangster flick, at the Biograph Theater. The agents were waiting for Dillinger as he strolled out of the cinema, and when he came into view they unleashed their bullets. Dillinger collapsed in a dark alley, dead at the age of 31. Because of the way the lights colored Sage’s orange skirt, it would be said forever after that Dillinger was betrayed by “The Woman in Red.”

Though the ambush in Chicago cut short Dillinger’s 14-month crime spree and meteoric rise to fame, it sealed his reputation as one of the great bank robbers of all time. He died with at least a dozen confirmed heists, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, to his credit. With brazen attacks on police stations (Dillinger and company hit the cops to build their arsenal), jailbreaks, and various holdups and kidnappings also on his resume, Dillinger not only outpaced his many larger-than-life contemporaries—Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Ma Barker Gang—he joined the ranks of all-time desperados like Billy the Kid and Jesse James.

His untimely, violent death made him an idol. Falling in a blaze of glory saved him from the deliberate, grinding wheels of the criminal-justice system, the airing of his crimes in open court, and the images of a defeated convict confined like a caged animal. Like the legendary outlaws of the Old West, Dillinger lived hard, died young, and never burdened his admirers with the indignities of old age. “He was like a rock star,” says Lori Hyde, a Dillinger enthusiast in northeast Indiana. “He got airplay and newspaper coverage just like any rock star would now. That’s why his name has carried on for so long.”

Dillinger’s significance in American mythology is matched by his role in shaping history. Thanks largely to Prohibition and corruption in major cities such as Kansas City, Chicago, and St. Paul, Minnesota, the Midwest was the center of organized crime in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s. Often using these cities as their base of operations, armed bandits crisscrossed the countryside robbing and kidnapping with reckless abandon. Dillinger rode the crest of this crime wave and, thanks to a little panache, became its most visible face. The inability of local and state agencies, particularly in Indiana, to rein him in shone a harsh light on how outdated and outgunned law-enforcement was and encouraged passage of federal anti-crime legislation in the mid-1930s.

“The fledgling Indiana State Police used fear of Dillinger to justify spending when state government was poor,” says Pinkston. “The FBI followed the same trail. They wanted to increase their powers, and if they could create a larger-than-life person to justify increased authority and funding, they did it. Today, the police have radios, helicopters, and computers. The genesis of all that can be credited to Depression-era bad men. Every agency used that fear to build what they have now.” The state police still maintain a small Dillinger exhibit in their museum, a nod to their worthiest of historic adversaries.

But the truest mark of Dillinger’s lasting hold on the public imagination are the elaborate speculation and conspiracy theories that have grown up around him. One persistent rumor is that the body on display in Chicago wasn’t actually Dillinger’s. The story likely began when people questioned the appearance of Dillinger’s face, which he’d had surgically altered before dying. Jay Nash, a fringe Dillinger historian (or quasi-historian, as is often the case in Dillingerdom), wrote in his book The Dillinger Dossier that the bank robber’s death “was wholly accepted by the public, the press and, ostensibly, the FBI,” never mind that “little or nothing was ever said about the glaring out-and-out errors of the case.” To Nash’s thinking, the FBI, desperate to improve its image by convincing the public it had apprehended Dillinger, killed a patsy, ignored claims that he didn’t look like Dillinger, and reached an agreement with the real bank robber that he should disappear. In 1959, a man claiming to be an elderly Dillinger sent a letter and picture of himself to the Indianapolis Star; his story turned out to be a hoax.

Most historians dismiss Nash’s paranoid musings, noting that Dillinger’s family positively identified the body. But other tales about the gunman persist, the most popular of which involves his supposedly enormous penis. One morgue photo, a profile shot that shows a mysterious protuberance raising the sheet draped over his body, may have occasioned this part of Dillinger lore. While some experts have explained away the picture as showing nothing more extraordinary than an arm that rigor mortis had positioned awkwardly (and an arm does seem more plausible than a penis, given the height of the protuberance), it’s impossible to say exactly what caused it. What’s certain is that wild speculation was off and running—that the penis was removed, for example, placed in a jar, and squirreled away in the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian has denied the claim, and Dillinger’s autopsy report says nothing of severed genitals.

Hyde spends a lot of free time researching Dillinger minutiae, and says she disbelieves the penis legend because a friend of hers spoke with a woman who had visited Dillinger’s body in the Chicago morgue, peeked under the sheet, and not noticed anything unusual about the deceased’s private parts. In Dillingerdom, hearsay twice removed often passes for definitive proof.

In fact, a devoted subculture of Dillinger enthusiasts ranging from historians to nutcases still debates these theories as well as every other detail of Dillinger’s life and times. In the John Dillinger Died For You Society, described by one Web site as an “esoteric cult,” members stay abreast of the latest in Dillinger research and carry “credit cards” bearing a circle that says “insert pistol barrel here.” They recite a famous Dillinger saying, “Never trust a woman or an automatic pistol,” and keep a JDDFY songbook, which includes “The Ballad of John Dillinger”: “In an Indiana farm house / John Dillinger was raised. / His family, friends, and neighbors / This fine young man did praise.”

Hyde, who recently joined the JDDFY Society, lives in Corunna, Indiana, just a few miles from a police station Dillinger’s gang raided in 1933. When Hyde was a girl, her father pointed out Dillinger hangouts in the area. She’s been a diehard aficionado ever since and now maintains a Web site called the John Dillinger Scrapbook. One of her most prized possessions is a copy of the gangster’s death mask, which she keeps swaddled in bubble wrap. Another is a bag of shell casings from a Thompson submachine gun. The story goes that when Dillinger escaped from Crown Point in 1934, he stole the gun, which was on loan from the Porter County Sheriff’s Department. The feds seized the gun as evidence, stored it for years, and returned it to Porter County decades later. To mark the occasion, the sheriff’s department organized a small festival and invited Hyde to fire a few rounds from the gun.

“Even though he was a criminal, he was still a part of history,” Hyde says. “I and others like me are trying to keep his name alive.” She says she frequently fields e-mails from people who surf to her Web site; the most common query is from people wondering if Dillinger, known to drive over large swaths of the Midwest in brief periods of time, might have been their father.

In most of the country, debate over Dillinger rarely strays from the benign realm of historical interest. In Indiana, however, where many relatives of the bank robber, his gang, and their victims still reside, arguments over Dillinger’s legacy hit closer to home.

On January 15, 1934, Dillinger’s gang hit the First National Bank and Trust Co. in East Chicago—the robbery that preceded his flight to Arizona. In the ensuing skirmish, an East Chicago police officer, William O’Malley, was shot and killed. Eyewitnesses said the gunman was Dillinger. Almost a month later, after he was apprehended in Tucson and returned to Lake County to face murder charges, photographers captured an infamous image of a confident-looking Dillinger leaning chummily on the shoulder of a smiling Robert Estill, the prosecutor.

After his arraignment in Crown Point, Dillinger was committed to the Lake County Jail—from which he made his legendary escape with the carved wooden pistol. In the course of that escape, he also stole Sheriff Lillian Holley’s new V-8 Ford. When word got out that Dillinger was on the loose again, Crown Point became the laughingstock of the country. The media quickly dubbed it “Clown Point,” and for years thereafter letters from anywhere in the United States addressed to “Wooden Gun, Indiana” could be expected to arrive safely. Holley, who was serving as sheriff only to finish out her husband’s term following his death, bore the brunt of the onslaught. “Blonde Sheriff Bakes Pies as Killer Flees,” read a headline from one New York newspaper. Estill, the prosecutor photographed cozying up to Dillinger before the escape, saw his political ambitions fall to ruin.

Crown Point has never fully recovered from the ignominy of that incident. Partly out of embarrassment and partly out of respect for Holley, who died in 1994 at the age of 102, community leaders have shied away from publicizing the town’s Dillinger connection. The county jail from which Dillinger escaped sat virtually abandoned for the better part of a century, as though officials preferred to see it crumble along with the sore memories it housed. Though preservation efforts are now under way, the director of the project, John Heidbreder, discusses Dillinger only grudgingly. “We’re not a John Dillinger Society, and frankly we’re not concerned with Dillinger,” Heidbreder says.

In the mid-1990s, Speros Batistatos, then head of the Lake County Convention and Visitors Bureau, wanted to use Dillinger to generate tourism. When Randy Pinkston’s father, Joe, one of the earliest and most passionate Dillinger historians, died in 1996, he left behind a museum full of Dillinger artifacts—including a headstone that once graced Dillinger’s grave at Crown Hill—in Nashville, Indiana. Batistatos wanted to get the artifacts—the Lake County CVB eventually purchased them for more than $400,000—and co-promote a new museum with the old Lake County jail, then in the infant stages of preservation. But organizers of the jail project wanted no part of it. “There are events in history that some people would rather forget or not talk about,” says Batistatos. “They attempt to revise history and edit away things they deem unpleasant.”

Phil Struebig, who bought the Crown Point Criminal Courts Building, which sits next to the jail and was the site of Dillinger’s arraignment, tells the same story. When he began renovation of the building nearly 15 years ago, he found that the town’s “old guard” was less than happy about his plans to advertise the landmark’s Dillinger history. “They freaked out,” he says. “They think Dillinger is bad for Crown Point.” Undeterred, Struebig and his wife, Cynthia, opened a ’30s-themed bar they called The Great Escape.

Among others in Lake County, distaste for Dillinger runs deeper than the embarrassment his escape caused. Shari Jazyk, great-granddaughter of William O’Malley, the cop Dillinger allegedly shot, grew up there, in a family that regarded Dillinger as persona non grata. “A lot of people aren’t aware just how brutal and sadistic this man was,” says Jazyk. “It’s a shame that people like that are put on a pedestal and made celebrities.” When the Lake County Convention and Visitors Bureau opened its Dillinger museum, it agreed, at the insistence of the O’Malley family, to install a memorial to the fallen officer at the entrance. “We wanted people to walk in and know right away what kind of man Dillinger was,” says Jazyk. “He was a killer.”

On the other hand, many Dillinger devotees refuse to accept that he killed anyone. “Dillinger was blamed for every robbery committed while he was loose,” says Hyde. “But I don’t believe he was there. And even if he was, O’Malley kept bouncing bullets off his bulletproof vest, so he fired back. If he did do it, it wasn’t intentional. He wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer and didn’t find enjoyment in hurting people.” She cites reports that Dillinger was vacationing in Florida when the East Chicago robbery took place.

Ultimately, the answer to that most-loaded Dillinger question—was he a murderer?—will probably remain in the same nebulous netherworld as the answers to who shot Kennedy and what’s in Area 51. It’s true that there are differing accounts of Dillinger’s whereabouts when O’Malley’s killing occurred, and that Dillinger was never convicted of the murder. Yet it’s also true that he never gave authorities the chance to try him on the charge. For his part, Pinkston doesn’t understand defending a career criminal by drawing ethical distinctions. “I don’t relate to the idea that he only robbed banks with guns but didn’t kill people,” he says. “I guess it’s moral ground you can take to feel better. But he was in the jail in Lima, Ohio when the boys broke in to rescue him and killed the sheriff in the process. He knew that, if cornered, he would shoot his way out until he escaped. Whether or not he chose to murder people on a daily basis, I think he always knew the option was there. If it was kill or be killed, he wasn’t going to come out on the losing end.”

Far from Crown Point, in Dillinger’s former stomping grounds of Martinsville, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that the notorious gangster was a good old boy who got a bum deal. Tina Chafey co-owns a gift, tea, and antiques shop in the former Morgan County Sheriff’s Residence and Jail, where Dillinger was held before being sent upstate (the cell he occupied is now full of hummingbird collectibles). “What they did to him here was just wrong,” she says, referring to Dillinger’s inordinately long jail sentence. “I think he was just a nice guy and a party animal—that’s all he was guilty of. Oh, and he stole.” Her brother-in-law, who helped remodel the old sheriff s residence, adds with a wink, “I heard he was hung like a horse.”

A few blocks away, at another antiques shop, patrons hanging around the counter laugh proudly about Dillinger’s ability to elude the FBI. “He’s a Superman to some people,” says one of the men. Another man notes that he grew up listening to old-timers spin yarns about running around with Dillinger. “If I could get away with robbing a bank, I probably would, too.”

“As far as people around here are concerned, he got into some trouble and was punished unmercifully,” says Larry Incollingo, a former Bloomington Herald-Times reporter who covered south-central Indiana for years. “People believe that had he not gotten a raw deal in the beginning, Dillinger would have been a good person. Every once in a while I run into somebody older and they’ll say, ‘You know, those agents murdered him. They executed him without a trial.’ People feel very strongly about that.”

Dillinger’s staunchest defender is his great-nephew, Jeff Scalf, who grew up in a family that held tight to the image of their relation as beloved brother and uncle. Before she died, Scalf’s grandmother, Dillinger’s half-sister, told him, “If you can stop them from painting John as a killer, do it.” He took her request to heart and, in Pinkston’s words, “has made it his life’s goal to be a pain in the ass to everybody with anything to do with Dillinger.”

“My grandmother always said that John never killed anyone, that he wasn’t a vicious person,” says Scalf, who keeps several framed pictures of his great-uncle on a shelf in his office. “He just got mixed up in the wrong crowd, got a bad break, then went down the wrong path. The only reason I grant interviews is to make sure people know that he wasn’t a killer.”

Scalf recently instigated a legal dispute with the Lake County Convention and Visitors Bureau, partly because its memorial to Officer O’Malley asserts as fact that Dillinger was the shooter. He’s also gone after a restaurant called Dillinger’s in tiny Hudson, Indiana, claiming that his great-uncle was being portrayed as a murderer there, too. The restaurant is located in a former bank that was robbed by unknown assailants in 1933, and though there’s no evidence to suggest that Dillinger was among them—he was, in fact, in prison when the robbery occurred—local legend was enough to inspire the owners to display Dillinger news clippings, the original bank safe involved in the robbery, a mannequin dressed like Dillinger, and a knockoff of the death mask.

CRIME SCENES: John Dillinger's Indiana Exploits — Statewide, the gangster was nearly as well-traveled as Johnny Appleseed.
More on that here.

“There were a lot of bank robberies attributed to John, says Scalf. “One of my favorite stories from Grandma was when John was in Mooresville, sitting in a chair and reading the sports page. A report came over the radio—‘The Dillinger gang has struck again.’ John lowered the paper and listened, then looked at her, shook his head, and said, ‘See, Doris, there’s another robbery I’ll get blamed for but won’t see a nickel from.’”

Scalf says it was the widespread and indiscriminate appropriation of the Dillinger name that motivated him, on the advice of his attorneys, to reassert the family’s right of control. “I was told that if we didn’t protect the family name, it could be involved in stuff that we would not want—possibly even pornographic, because of the myths and legends about John’s sexual organ. The last thing anyone in our family wants to see is a John Dillinger sex toy.”

The Hudson restaurant’s willingness to capitalize on a dubious Dillinger connection illustrates another interesting phenomenon in the ongoing saga: Places with lesser claims to Dillinger’s legacy seem to assert those claims the hardest—and vice versa. Mooresville, for instance, has long downplayed its association with the bank robber. Several years ago, a local McDonald’s owner faced a minor public furor when he hung pictures of Dillinger in the restaurant. And in 2002, Scalf attempted to establish a Dillinger Days festival in Mooresville to boost tourism. But when he appeared before the town council to make his proposal, one of the more outspoken critics, councilman Tobey Dolen, called Dillinger a “criminal,” “murderer,” and “bum.” Contacted for this story, Dolen said he had “no comment whatsoever regarding John Dillinger” and hung up the phone.

Town boosters in Greencastle, on the other hand, point proudly to a former bank on the courthouse square, the site of a Dillinger robbery; last year, on the 70th anniversary of his visit, the town named its Main Street festival in his honor. T-shirts bearing his likeness were printed, with the slogan “Greencastle A Great Getaway.” “On Oct. 23, 1933 John Dillinger robbed the Central National Bank in Greencastle, Ind. and got away with $75,000,” read the shirts—“his biggest haul!”

In most of Indiana, Crown Point and Mooresville notwithstanding, having a legitimate claim to Dillinger’s legacy is a sort of status symbol. Perhaps this is because for historically significant sites, Indiana can’t rival the Atlantic states, and for celebrities it pales in comparison to the West Coast. In his day, Dillinger, a historical figure and celebrity both, put Indiana on the map. Now, “Dillinger robbed our bank” is the Hoosier equivalent of “George Washington slept here.” It doesn’t seem to matter that Dillinger usually stayed in town only long enough to clean it out.

Or perhaps Dillinger lingers on because, in legend at least, he embodies both the wholesome Midwestern values on which many Hoosiers pride themselves—politeness, a reverence for family, a stubborn independence—and a rules-be-damned lifestyle we only dream of. Clever and charismatic, he refused to be kept down. His historical persona is at once considerate and dangerous, bound by morality but free of the law. And it is these contradictions that make his legacy dynamic. “You have people who think he was a great man and people who think he was a killer,” says Incollingo. If they ever come to agreement, we’ll know that our most celebrated criminal has finally fallen into the dustbin of history.

Photo of Dillinger gravestone by Tony Valainis; photo of Dillinger with guns courtesy Indiana Historical Society;
photos of Dillinger seated and at morgue courtesy John Dillinger Died For You Society; mugshot and newspaper
clipping courtesy Indiana State Archives.

This article appeared in the July 2004 issue.

The Amazing Tunnys

by Tony Rehagen — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 21:00:00 GMT

Editor's Note, March 21, 2013: The Speedrome has firmed up deals with an array of sponsors—Ivy Tech Community College, Indiana Grand Casino, and O'Reilly Auto Parts—in a marketing boost to this, Indy's underdog racetrack. The Speedrome has aggressively pursued these contracts at a time in which IndyCar and other races and series such as the Brickyard 400 find their organizations in financially tight places. Here's more on the Tunnys, a family of racers who call the Speedrome home:

Five miles east of Monument Circle, on the far edge of Irvington, the railroad runs past factories and warehouses and a tiny asphalt racetrack. There is no infield, just a rubber-streaked oval two-tenths of a mile in circumference, little bigger than a hockey rink, surrounded by a wire fence and grandstands of bleachers and folding metal chairs. During the week, the Indianapolis Speedrome stands as empty as many of the abandoned buildings on the industrial east side. But every summer Saturday night, the place comes alive with beer-swilling fans who’ve paid $11 to watch four hours of action, semi-pro drivers trading paint in everything from go-karts to jalopies, all of it just prelude to the mayhem that is the main event, a little-known battle royale of bent metal that may just be auto racing’s truest spectacle: the Figure 8.

By 10 p.m., the stadium lights are casting the shadows of 18 racecars revving at the starting line. They are called late models, long, low-riding boxes of sheet metal riveted to aluminum frames, open front wheels flanking the nose, rear tires enclosed beneath vertical fins, the actual purpose of which no one is certain. The engines are American from the ’60s and ’70s—400-plus cubic inches—and as the field accelerates into Turn 1, their combined horsepower shakes the ground, rattling the crowd to its feet, its cheers choked by the fumes of spent fuel. But as the cars round the pylon at Turn 2, the drivers pull the wheel sharply left and then cut diagonally across the infield to the opposite corner, where they brake into a right turn. After just seconds in the short chute, the drivers pull another right, slicing back across the middle to complete the “8.” As the laps tick by, the field spreads out, and cars begin to meet on their crisscrossing paths at center track, some going 70 miles per hour. Often, drivers swerve to avoid each other, or one or both brake, sometimes to a halt. Sometimes the spectators get what they think they came for: two wild men, checkers in their eyes, each refusing to deviate from his course. The scream of rubber and the crunch of crumpled metal. A column of flame and smoke. A red flag and a heavy silence as the medics pull the men from the wreckage. But the true lure of the Speedrome is the anticipation, hanging above the grandstands, palpable among drivers and spectators alike, who force themselves to look on as weekend heroes manage to dodge disaster over and over again.

Every September since 1977, fans have packed the stands to watch the World Figure 8 Championship—the granddaddy race of the sport. As many as 60 drivers compete, each sweating it out for three hours in closed cockpits and fire suits for 400 to 500 laps, trying to take home an oversized check for $20,000. The Enduro, as the drivers call it, is the most prestigious Figure 8 race, and success requires a blend of skill, stamina, guts, and luck that they believe sets them apart from any oval-goer at Indy or Daytona. Over three hours, drivers may face the crossover 1,000 times, a fact that some in the sport believe makes it the hardest race in the world to win.

Blood with octane this high runs through generations. Speedrome lineups from seven decades are seeded with the same surnames, Seniors and Juniors and a few IIIs. But no family is more synonymous with this track or this sport than the Tunnys of Indianapolis, who have run the 8 here for almost 50 years. The men pitted on Tunny Row are Speedrome royalty, having won 165 feature races and six track championships. They’ve also owned the Enduro, winning it five times and placing in the top three in 10 of the last 12. This year, there will be six Tunnys—Bill Jr. and sons Ben, Jesse, and Austin; Bill’s brother, Bruce; and Bruce’s son, Mark—vying for a place on the three-hour podium.

Preparations begin three miles east of the Speedrome in the Tunny Garage, a sagging structure behind the home of the patriarch, 80-year-old Bill Tunny Sr. Every November, the Tunny boys strip their cars down to aluminum tubes, replacing worn parts, welding frames, and reassembling rear ends while warming their hands over their rebuilt engines or the fire in the corner stove. The cars are gradually pieced back together until spring, when the overhead door rolls open and it’s time to go racing.

On a race day in April, Ben Tunny’s No. 5 sits in the garage assembled and poised, its weight distributions and suspension settings recorded in a binder labeled TUNNY RACING: TOP SECRET. But the car is not quite ready. Squatting beside the front, 24-year-old Ben sprays a pool of white paint onto a piece of plastic. He wets a small brush and begins to daintily whiten the faded Hoosier logo on his tires. From the stands, he says, they’ll look like new.

Attention to the car’s appearance is a tradition that began in this very garage in 1963, when Bill Sr. fixed up a ’53 Chevy sedan for one of his brothers to drive in the 8. At the time, most of the entries were rusted-out jalopies, junkers patched together and bearing the scrapes of collisions past. Bill Sr.’s cars were painted a light blue and polished after every race, dings smoothed and refinished. “It shines them up for the people in the stands so they can see your decals—the sponsors appreciate that,” says Bill Jr. “It’s also about pride in what you’re doing.” Bill Jr. and younger brother Bruce absorbed this ethos from their earliest days, watching from the stands alongside their mom and sister in matching black-and-white-checkered Tunny Racing T-shirts. As they got older, they were in the pits banging out dents and touching up the blue paint themselves. They honed their skills running jury-rigged pushcarts with lawnmower wheels down the hill at Flat Rock River, or taping numbers to their bikes and grinding a dirt “8” into Bill Sr.’s backyard.

When Bill Sr. came home one day in 1977 to find 17-year-old Bill Jr. in the garage among the scattered pieces of a dismantled GTO, he shook his head and walked back up to the house. He watched from afar as his son built his own racecar. “I didn’t want him to get into it,” says Bill Sr. “I knew what was involved. You gotta work like hell at it. But once he proved himself, I helped him all I could.”

The same held true when Bruce followed suit a couple of years later. Both Tunny boys won races in their rookie years—and many thereafter. Barrel-chested Bill Jr. was aggressive, standing on the gas from corner to corner in the crossover, earning the nickname “Wild Bill.” Bruce was cooler, more calculating, hanging back to let the race come to him. Of course, when the Tunny brothers ran up against each other, all bets were off. “When we even got close,” says Bruce, “all the announcer could talk about was getting ready for ‘sparks to fly.’”

In one race, the two were so close fighting for the lead in the 8 that Bruce’s car ran up onto the side of Bill Jr.’s, putting Bruce on two wheels before both cars spun out. Such a mishap would end the evenings of most competitors, but the Tunny lead was so great that the two were able to pull back out and fight to the last lap. “He won,” Bruce recalls, his voice tinged with equal amounts of disgust and respect.

The Speedrome opened in 1941, one of dozens of hometown and neighborhood tracks popping up all over the Midwest at the time. Legend has it that Figure 8 racing was invented here in the 1950s, when, looking for added excitement and hoping to lure fans, promoter Art Zipp took a stick and drew an “8” in the dirt.

While the sport may have been concocted as a gimmick, drivers bristle at the idea that it is nothing more than a demolition derby. Fans may want to see carnage, but drivers want to win, and the best way to do that is not to wreck. “You don’t just close your eyes,” says Duane “The General” Lee, a 15-year veteran of the Figure 8 and four-time Speedrome champion. “You’ve got to know who you’re racing.” Lee says that in the 1 to 2 seconds it takes to speed through the crossover, a veteran can almost instinctively factor in his surroundings to tell whether he needs to hit the brakes or the gas. First, it’s about track position—slower drivers will generally yield to the leaders. Second, after years of racing the same guys every week, a driver knows who has money and doesn’t care if he tears up his car. “It gets to the point where you don’t even think about it,” says Bill Jr. “If you think about it too much, and you change your mind or he changes his, you’re going to crash.”

That doesn’t mean drivers don’t consider the dangers. After a crossover wreck that pinned Jesse Tunny’s thumb between the steering wheel and a bar, the 21-year-old is tentative steering with his right hand. Bruce Tunny lowers his voice to a reverent tone when recounting his 1985 crossover collision, after which he had to be cut from the wreckage, tire marks visible on his seat. “Sometimes you’re racing four cars on either side at 70 mph while cars are coming right at you from the side and all you can see is the bumper in front of you,” says Jesse. “In those moments,” adds Ben, “your butt puckers up.”

Somewhere there is a Speedrome rulebook of specs and guidelines for the competitors and the cars. But no one can seem to remember the last time it was referenced. In fact, outside of naming the winner, track officials pretty much leave the drivers alone. When there is a disagreement, the parties are usually left to straighten matters out themselves. The pits are rife with hearsay about who said what about whom, or who is about to get their ass kicked for something they did on the track. Sometimes matters escalate to shouting, screaming, and throwing of equipment. An angry driver might run over to another car, reach in through the window, and grab his alleged offender. There may be punches thrown. On occasion, weapons like a jack handle or a crowbar will appear. Once, in the late ’80s, Bruce Tunny had a pistol leveled at him. On the track. The Speedrome banned the gunman from the premises—for two weeks.

PHOTO GALLERY: Fast Times with the Tunnys

Over 50 years, the Tunnys have been involved in plenty of arguments, and their continued success has spawned resentment from other drivers and their fans. Tunny team policy has always been to try to talk things out man to man. But when a driver messes with one Tunny, he had better be prepared to face them all.

On a warm Speedrome night in late April, word has made it down to Tunny Row that another driver, Cory Turner, isn’t happy about some recent run-ins with the youngest Tunny, 19-year-old Austin. Turner’s camp, the rumors go, is predicting that tonight, Austin won’t finish the 8. “Cory’s a hothead just like his daddy,” says Bill Jr. “I went to school with Danny Turner. I used to race against him. The closest I’ve ever come to punching someone was Danny Turner.”

Austin starts the race on the pole, but he loses the lead on the first lap and quickly falls back into the pack. On lap 25 of 70,

Austin makes contact with a car running alongside him in the crossover. His right side comes off the ground and slams into the pavement, sending his car spinning and collecting others in a colossal smoke-shrouded wreck.

It’s impossible to follow all the action at the Speedrome, and at speed, even the drivers can’t always be sure who initiated contact. There is no instant replay, no Jumbotron where fans can review every on-track dust-up. But on this night, some things are clear. When the haze lifts, in the middle of the logjam sits Cory Turner.

Helmet off, middle brother Jesse Tunny jumps out of his car and runs to Turner’s window, leaning in and waving his finger. Out of nowhere, oldest brother Ben arrives, running his car into Turner’s rear bumper. Turner emerges from his cockpit, Ben takes Jesse’s place in Turner’s face, and the two exchange words from beneath their helmets. Suddenly, Turner flails a clenched right hand at Ben’s head. The two scuffle, Ben putting Turner in a headlock before Turner takes him down. Bedlam ensues, as Turner’s brother, Chris, and father, Danny, rush onto the track to get into the action. Finally the police come onto the track to break things up. The race continues without Ben or Jesse or Turner.

A few minutes later, back on Tunny Row, Ben is in his stall, desperately cranking on the right front suspension, concerned about the season points standings and trying to get back to finish the race. His father strolls up slowly, returning from the officials’ office.

“You’re done,” Bill Jr. says, calm but stern. “That’s what’s best.”

“I couldn’t …” Ben says, exasperated. But his father cuts him off, noticing the black mark below his son’s right eye getting darker.

“Well,” says Bill Jr. “He got you.”

In 1981, the Speedrome came under fire from neighbors in Irvington, who complained to Mayor Bill Hudnut that the cars and the PA were too loud. At town hall meetings, disgruntled citizens pushed for the track to be shut down. In stepped Bill Sr.’s wife, Phyllis Tunny. The Speedrome was her family’s life. She practically raised her children there. Racing kept her sons busy working on cars and out of trouble. It held them together.

Phyllis started a “Save the Speedrome” campaign, circulating a petition and soliciting letters to the media and city officials. Eventually, the track agreed to shut off the PA after 11 p.m. and to require all cars to have mufflers. But the track remained open. Phyllis had helped save her family’s home.

Racing and working on a car monopolize so much of a driver’s time that, over decades, wives and children have been forced to put down roots in the Speedrome stands. It takes a special kind of understanding. Ben has lost a string of girlfriends who didn’t want to share him with the track. Bruce met his first wife while she was working as the facility scorekeeper. Jesse’s wife grew up at the Speedrome like he did, the child of a driver.

Bill Jr. jokes that he duped his wife, Rosann, into becoming a Speedrome woman. When he finally convinced her to go on a date with him to the track, he neglected to tell her that he would be driving that evening. She has since spent a majority of her Saturday nights there, first cheering on her husband, and eventually their three boys. Today, she can be seen patrolling the pits on race nights, making sure that Ben remembers to eat, seeing if Austin is okay after a frustrating finish, or wiping the grease off of Jesse’s face with a mother’s thumb. She says she’s happy her boys are here on the weekends with their father and grandfather. But even she covers her eyes when one of them enters the crossover.

However, just as women like Danica Patrick, Sarah Fisher, and Ashley Force are breaking through in other series, gender roles at the Speedrome are slowly starting to shift. Even though a female has yet to make her mark on the 8, a new generation of women can be seen in fire suits racing in some of the smaller car classes. Bruce’s 21-year-old daughter, Katie Tunny, was raised racing bikes with her brothers and cousins, but when the boys graduated to go-karts in the school parking lot, she was left out. “Since I was a freshman in high school, I’ve been begging my dad for a go-kart,” she says. “He’s super-protective. I’m the only girl in the family.”

Katie refuses to idly wait for her turn at the wheel. Instead, she puts on a pair of gloves and works side by side in the pits with Bruce and Mark on their cars, helping where she can. She has rigged up a webcam in their cockpits so they can replay races and analyze their performance. During the 8, she climbs to the top of her dad’s trailer so she can better follow the action. She knows almost every driver, a bit of their history and their style. And when a Tunny makes a move, she almost leaps off the trailer with excitement. “A lot of my friends choose to do stupid stuff on Saturday nights,” she says. “I spend the whole summer with my family.”

Less than four months before the Enduro, on a hot night in May, the younger Tunny boys fitfully tinker with their cars in preparation for tonight’s 100-lap Figure 8. Meanwhile, Bruce, the veteran, puffs away on cigarettes, flipping butts from his lawn chair in the back of his trailer. When the PA announcer finally calls the 16 cars to the gate, Bruce takes one last drag and zips up his faded blue jacket, connecting the stitched “T-U” on the right breast to the “N-N-Y” on the left. He climbs into his No. 3T and fires it up.

When the green flag drops, Bruce quickly works his way from sixth to second, closing fast on the leader, No. 71. After several blocked attempts to pass, Bruce backs off until he sees an opening on lap 6, flooring it through the crossover and plowing into the back of the No. 71, which spins out of control, to the delight and dismay of a divided crowd now watching Bruce in the lead.

By lap 37, Bruce’s nephew Ben has moved from the back of the field to take third place. On lap 72, he overtakes brother Austin for second. Now Bruce and Ben pull away, bumper-to-bumper, full-throttle through the crossover as they lap stragglers. Ben ap-
pears to have the faster car, but he is unable to get around. Ben tries to go low, then high, but Bruce won’t let him past. On lap 88, Ben musters one last attempt, managing to get alongside his uncle in the crossover. But as they brake into the turn, Bruce noses in front again. When the checkered flag falls after 100 caution-free laps, the No. 3T crosses the finish line a car length ahead.

Bruce hands his father the checkered flag as he gets out of the car and approaches the PA announcer and the microphone to address the crowd from center track. “I was done on lap 35,” he says, breathing hard. “Maybe this is a sign for me to get back on the exercise bike. Especially against drivers that drive as hard as those young boys.”

Later in the pits, the Tunny crew members lay out their versions of the race. “The fact that he came down on you like that,” says Bill Jr., “I’d have done the same thing. You’re not going to get it easy.”

“I really wanted to pass him,” Ben says. “But I didn’t want to wreck him, and I couldn’t get around.”

“Why didn’t you floor it and tag him?” someone asks.

Ben hesitates, mentally paging back through the evening. He is not wired to stare patiently at anyone’s back bumper. But, as his father has taught him, a driver has always got to think about next week. And a Tunny must sometimes take an even longer view. Ben shakes his head and answers through clenched teeth.

“Makes Thanksgivings difficult,” he says.

Photo by Tony Valainis.

This article originally appeared in the September 2011 issue.

IM CRIME FILES: Murder, She Wrote

by Bettie Cadou & Brian D Smith — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 16:21:00 GMT

Editor’s Note: The following originally appeared in the September 1996 issue and is included among IM's Best-Ever Crime Stories. Co-author Bettie Cadou was a longtime reporter for The Indianapolis News and taught journalism at Butler University and IUPUI. After her death in 2002, she was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. Brian D. Smith is a former IM senior editor.

The saga began routinely enough: Robert Gierse, 34, and Robert Hinson, 30—two businessmen known to be hardy partiers—didn’t show up for work on the morning of December 1, 1971. Then morning turned to afternoon, and, when calls to their home and other likely hangouts yielded no sign of the pair, a business associate decided to check their house at 1318 North LaSalle Street.

He found them, all right: throats cut, hands and feet bound with strips of sheets. Also in the house was their friend James Barker, 27, who’d suffered the same grisly fate. The call to the police sounded so surreal that the dispatcher sent one officer to investigate. He spent only moments in the house before dashing to his patrol car, heart pumping. “Send me 83 [homicide],” he barked into his radio. “Send me identifications, send me a coroner, send me superior officers—we’ve got a triple murder!”

The dispatcher sent a legion of investigators, but none could solve the case that came to be known as the LaSalle Street murders. No suspect confessed, no one was convicted or even arrested, nor did any witness with significant information come forward.

Winter came and went, as did spring, summer, and fall, and 18 more like them. By 1991, the LaSalle Street murders occupied a small place in local lore: a seemingly perfect crime that had once kept an entire city in suspense, but was barely remembered now.

That March, however, the case resurfaced. Like a forest fire, it began as a small spark, igniting the recollection of an occasional Indianapolis News correspondent. Her name was Carol Schultz, and she was used to writing feature stories on topics such as peas and sunflowers. Had she been content to continue writing about peas and sunflowers, hardly anyone in 1996 would be thinking about a triple homicide that occurred in 1971.

But Schultz also became interested—no, obsessed—with the LaSalle Street murders, and by the time her obsession ran its course, it had consumed nearly four years of her life; led to two men’s indictments on murder charges; cost Schultz her part-time writing job; and left her and nearly everyone connected to the case with enough egg on their faces for a Denny’s breakfast.

Changing from home-and-garden writer into dogged sleuth, Schultz scavenged the long-buried secretof LaSalle Street and retrieved enough curios to put the old case (and herself) in the news. Her efforts could have launched her journalistic career; could have brought the unknown killers to justice; could have cracked one of the greatest murder mysteries in Indianapolis history. But when her unbridled enthusiasm trampled the rules of ethics and evidence, the case she helped craft self-destructed before it even came to trial.

In a May 1996 hearing to set bond for one suspect, Marion Superior Judge Paula Lopossa declared, “The court finds that the investigation was compromised by the meddling of Carol Schultz, who is a very biased former investigative reporter.” Hours later, Marion County prosecutor Scott Newman moved to dismissed the case, calling it “impossible to prosecute” and adding, “There is absolutely no hope of conviction.”

It all seemed clear enough: An over-exuberant writer built a case that collapsed onto its own shaky foundation, leaving a coat of grime on the reputations of those who believed her. Yet, like almost everything else in this quarter-century-old saga, even this conclusion can’ t necessarily be trusted.

Moreover, even as LaSalle Street slips back into history, a smaller mystery-within-a-mystery remains: Who was Carol Schultz, and how did she single-handedly resurrect one of Indianapolis’s most notorious unsolved crimes?

Schultz can’t easily explain the lure of LaSalle Street, or why her life came to revolve around the lives and deaths of three eastside businessmen from the ’70s. “It just intrigued me,” she says in a classic understatement.

While few people would have tackled the mystery with such fervor, there’s no denying its JFK-like complexity. Within a week of the murders, investigators concocted a spectrum of possible motives, including: (1) an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend was enraged that his beloved was dating one of the men ; (2) a former employer of Hinson and Gierse had $150,000 life insurance policies (set to expire in two days) on them; (3) Gierse and Hinson, who operated a microfilming business, had resisted a mob effort to control the industry; and (4) Hinson knew too much—i.e., the killer or killers of a fourth man, John C. Terhorst, whose body was found in Eagle Creek months earlier.

The jealous “ex” scenario seemed especially plausible when authorities learned that the trio, all single, had engaged in a contest to see who could bed the most women. According to one source, the three had amassed a cumulative score of 63 at the time of their deaths.

In a strange way, their sex appeal persisted beyond the grave. “I was attracted to these great-looking guys who were my age, guys who romanced all these women,” says Schultz, 34. “I have to admit, if it had been three fat old women, I don’t think I’d have been that interested.”

Her involvement began in low-key fashion: In March 1991, the News correspondent was assigned to write a story about Unsolved Mysteries taping a program in Indianapolis. That might have been the end of it, but Schultz expanded on the idea. “I thought, wow, it’d be really great to do a sidebar on ‘What’s Indianapolis’s biggest unsolved mystery?’ I was laying on that waterbed in that room in there,” she says, pointing toward the back of her modest southeastside home, “and I remembered my dad talking to me about LaSalle Street when I was a little girl.” After realizing the crime had occurred almost exactly 20 years earlier, she got an editor’s permission to do an anniversary story on the slayings. Despite having only a medium-length story to write, she treated the assignment like a doctoral thesis.

Her interview with Indianapolis Police Department Lieutenant Michael Popcheff, who had investigated the crime in 1971, led to weekly one-hour conversations with the officer at a nearby Waffle House, Schultz says. By her account, after one meeting, as Popcheff was preparing to pay the bill, he suddenly turned to her and said, “You know, there’s been a new clue in this case. It’s a one-in-a-million shot, but why don’t you mess around with it?”

The one-in-a-million shot was more like a shot in the dark: A former waitress at the now-defunct Tommy’s Starlight Palladium had recently talked of seeing a man with “dark, evil, crazy eyes” enter the bar on the night of the murder. This matched a young Bible student’s description of a man in a parked car on LaSalle Street that night.

Schultz says she found and interviewed the Bible student (in Michigan), the former waitress (working at a laundromat), and relatives of the victims. Each week she would report back to the officer, drawing increasing respect, Schultz says. “He’d say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe you’re finding these people,” she says. “It was a pat on my back, kind of like having a story on the front page.”

The assignment took on a life of its own, existing more for its own sake than for any long-term goal of cracking the case. “It wasn’t that I was so focused on solving the murders,” she says. “It was the adrenaline I was hooked on, and it was making me physically better.”

Health has been a lifelong concern for Schultz, who was born with serious liver problems that have periodically resurfaced. She talks of being in and out of hospitals since childhood, which limited her aspirations of becoming a journalist. Older sister Dianna Kincaid, a local real estate agent, recalls Carol as a child with relentless “show-me” curiosity. “As a little girl, if you told her she would get hurt doing something,” says Kincaid, “she had to find out for herself that it was going to hurt.” Their mother once told young Carol not to jump off the coffee table onto the couch, lest she hit her mouth. But Carol, who had to find out for herself, did just that, cutting her chin. The scar remains to this day.

As a teenager, the former Carol Caldwell attended Creston Junior High and Warren Central High School, worked on the school newspaper and earned a scholarship to Ball State University, Schultz recalls. But she quit school as a l6-year-old junior, got a job as a waitress and married her boss, a man six years her senior. The couple traveled around the country in a van, working as a waitress and grill cook, but her pregnancy sent them back to Indianapolis, where Schultz took a job as a keypunch operator. The experience prompted a still-present quirk: the ability to summon telephone numbers from memory by punching an imaginary touch-tone pad in the air.

A son was born, but their marriage didn’t last, and in 1984 Schultz resumed her quest for a writing career. She passed the GED and enrolled in journalism classes at IUPUI, twice winning a Thomas R. Keating Award from the IU School of Journalism. Former IUPUI journalism professor Dennis Cripe, now at Franklin College, recalls her as a high achiever. “I was impressed with her work,” Cripe says. “As an advisor to the new students, I held Carol up as a good model for the kind of writing we should have.”

While Schultz never got a bachelor’s degree (she blames health problems), she at least managed to find correspondent work with The Indianapolis News. The money wasn’t great, perhaps $25 per story, but like many at her experience level, she was treading the well-worn path of apprenticeship.

Yet, like the child who always had to find out for herself, Schultz had long pushed beyond the usual parameters of her writing assignments, interviewing 10 sources when two or three would do. “I was never satisfied with a little 12-inch story,” she says. “I always felt I had to do the biggest, the best, the most.” It was more than the usual competitive drive; Schultz wanted to do an “in-your-face” on a lifetime of naysayers. “I had so many doctors tell me I was terminal, that I was going to die, that I was a nothing and a nobody because I was handicapped,” she says, “that I had to prove to myself that I could write the best story, have the best sources. It was a personal challenge.”

Ambition met opportunity on LaSalle Street. Given a crime story with a bottomless pit of possibilities, offering a challenge that no one had surmounted, Schultz persevered like the Energizer bunny. Despite her sparse income, she utilized every resource she could muster. She conducted hundreds of interviews, many with sources out of state, but avoided a massive telephone bill by placing calls through the Star/News switchboard, Schultz says. She retrieved every newspaper story available at the Central Library. She drove by the bars the victims used to frequent. And when she could think of nothing else, she went to the crime scene. “I’d drive by the death house and sit and wonder,” she says.

Even tangential topics caught her eye. “The guys were Masons,” she notes, “so I got books on the Masons and read them.” Actually, the guys were barely Masons—Gierse and Hinson had just been inducted into the Broad Ripple Masonic Lodge, and Barker was awaiting the same ceremony, but no matter. “It was my illness that was driving me: Adrenaline is healing,” she says. “I became obsessed with the healthiness I was feeling as a result of this case.”

And she became obsessed with finding a man with dark, evil, crazy eyes. Told that a local newspaper reporter had once identified two men as the most likely perpetrators, she dug up the old article. The first suspect was a deceased underworld figure, while the second was a still-living reputed Teamsters thug with unusual dark eyes.

Bingo—Schultz had her man, or so it seemed. She sent her entire file to Unsolved Mysteries, and was excited to learn that a film crew would return to Indianapolis in the fall of ‘91 to tape a segment on LaSalle Street. Meanwhile, she even located the dark-eyed suspect in a remote fishing village in Florida. Schultz could picture it all: Once Unsolved Mysteries aired the story, she would call the FBI and have agents surround the man’s house.

She kept his picture on her refrigerator for more than a year, and her house teemed with boxes and files on the case. But the solution to her personal game would prove tougher than “Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with a lead pipe”—especially after police said the dark-eyed Floridian was not a suspect.

Schultz’s editor at The News, Mark Ridolfi, had long since tired of the topic. When she tried to pitch him one more LaSalle Street story, he demurred, saying the newspaper could do only so many articles on the subject.

Regardless, her search went on. Her police contacts gave her access to intimate information—including the names of the victims’ ex-lovers. Schultz says she found several of them, but was stymied in her attempt to locate Gierse’s ex-girlfriend, Diane Horton. Then a former secretary with the microfilming firm put Schultz in touch with Diane’s ex-husband: an elderly engine shop owner named Carroll Horton.

Schultz called him, and the conversation immediately turned to LaSalle Street. She felt an instant affinity with Horton, a man who reminded her of her late father. “I have memories as a little girl of riding in the pickup and going out to auto parts stores,” she says.

Horton won’t comment on the case, so details of their phone conversations come entirely from Schultz. As she tells it, however, Horton told her he had ESP, and she was all ears. “You do?” she replied. “Really? All my life I’ve had dreams that have come true and have always been interested in ESP.”

Then Horton told her, “My ESP is telling me right now that you’re going to be the one to solve this case. Stick with me and I’m gonna help you win the Pulitzer Prize.” Schultz was delighted.

“This was the first time I’d met anyone as interested as I was in the LaSalle Street murders,” she says. “He became my new best friend."

Schultz says the two began chatting daily about the case, for which Horton showed intense interest. “He wanted to know everything I was doing: who I talked to, when, what they said,” she says. “He was so easy to talk to, and he reminded me of my daddy.”

The budding relationship reveals Schultz’s dichotomy: a relentless reporter with a touch of unworldliness. Julie Slaymaker, former president of the Woman’s Press Club of Indiana, concurs. Acknowledging Schultz’s dedication, she says, “I would describe her as vulnerable and perhaps a little naive.”

Schultz’s father figure pointed her to another possible source, Floyd Michael Chastain, a convicted murderer incarcerated in a Florida prison. In the summer of 1992 she wrote him a letter, and on September 1, 1992, Chastain called her collect. “Ma’am, I got your letter,” he began. “This is very serious, because I know who killed the men on LaSalle Street.” Chastain then tried to convince Schultz to fly to Florida, but she insisted her editor wouldn’t let her.

Schultz says she pressed him to tell her the murderer’s identity. “What does he do for a living? Does he work on cars like you?” she asked the former Mars Hill mechanic. “Yes, ma’am,” Chastain replied. “Is it? ... It’s not ...” she said, choking on the name. So Chastain said it for her: “Carroll Horton.” And suddenly, Horton’s intense interest in the case seemed to make chilling sense.

Chastain later told Schultz that he, Horton, and three other men broke into the house early on December 1. Chastain said he killed Hinson and Horton killed Gierse; he wasn’t sure who killed Barker.

His characterization of Horton contrasted that of a 1996 Star story, which identified him as an Indianapolis 500 chief mechanic in the ’60s who “developed several revolutionary engine designs.” What it didn’t mention was Horton’s darker side: an arrest record that dated to 1953, according to court documents. Through the years, Horton incurred a range of mostly minor charges ranging from defrauding a hotel keeper to child molesting (although several charges, including molesting, were dismissed). Some raps stuck: From 1985 through ’86, Horton served 19 months for a three-count theft conviction.

Schultz knew none of this at the time, but Chastain’s allegations pushed her over the line between reporter and eyewitness. Within two weeks of her chat with Chastain, Schultz took her information to the authorities. “I was a reporter, yet still a citizen,” she explains. “I surrendered information I thought was important to the case while trying not to compromise my work as a journalist.”

But the compromise was well under way. Her conversations with sources took a decidedly unprofessional turn, as terms such as “I love you” escaped her lips and Chastain’s during their conversations. Schultz says she felt only friendship for Chastain, but he seemingly had deeper affection for her, as evidenced by the correspondence he sent her (characterized in court records as “love letters”). “I’m sure he had fantasies,” she says, “but I never led him on. I said, ‘I love you. I love you as a Christian.'” Even so, her behavior was hardly the conduct of Woodward and Bernstein.

Then again, although Judge Lopossa characterized her as a “former investigative reporter,” Schultz had done no previous investigative work for the News before her foray onto LaSalle Street—and even then, she wasn’t supposed to do anything resembling investigative work. Accordingly, Schultz might not have realized she was venturing across the bounds of journalistic protocol.

At any rate, after viewing LaSalle Street as intriguing drama, Schultz suddenly became one of the lead actors. Abandoning any semblance of professional detachment, in October 1992 she complied with a police request to wear a hidden microphone and to pass along information she knew was bogus: that Horton’s fingerprints were found inside the LaSalle Street home.

This was more than enough for Ridolfi, who fired her as a correspondent. It didn’t stop her from writing about LaSalle Street. Having spurred the investigation, Schultz jumped back over the journalistic fence, writing freelance articles for the alternative newspaper Nuvo Newsweekly. Her stories all but urged the prosecutor’s office to take action on the case. “Marion County Prosecutor Jeffrey Modisett has vetoed [Sheriff Joseph] McAtee’s urging to at least bring the case to a grand jury, claiming his ‘witnesses are not credible,’’’ she wrote in 1993. “Why are requests from a sheriff with 30 years in law enforcement ignored at the prosecutor’s office?”

Schultz also contacted the Vidocq Society, a Philadelphia-based organization of about 300 elite specialists who volunteer in the investigation of unsolved homicides.

Vidocq agreed to take the case, offering suggestions to McAtee—who had originally investigated the murders—and Popcheff.

The organization, however, began harboring doubts about Schultz, says Vidocq ‘s Richard Walter, a forensic psychologist. Walter says he warned Schultz not to get overly close to sources, but she paid no heed. “Dealing with her is like trying to herd a group of cats down a driveway,” he says. “I’m uncomfortable, quite frankly, of working outside law enforcement circles, and I was getting more and more concerned about Carol.”

The once-dormant case had already begun popping again. Not only did investigators fly to Florida to interview Chastain, but in a momentous development, a woman who claimed she was in the house during the slayings came forward. She was interviewed, then hypnotized, reportedly corroborating Chastain’s account of the killings. Even so, Modisett wouldn’t present the case to a grand jury.

But by January 1995 it didn’t matter. Having lost in the 1994 election, Democrat Modisett was replaced by a new prosecutor, Republican Scott Newman, who promised to move the case to the front burner. Evidently he did: On March 22, 1996, a grand jury indicted Horton, 70, and Chastain, 44, on three murder counts each, nearly a quarter-century after the triple slaying on LaSalle Street.

It was the day Schultz had anticipated, even prepared for. She had stowed two bottles of champagne in her mother’s refrigerator, and planned to hire a limousine to celebrate the outcome. And for a while, she basked in the glow of her efforts. After years as an obscure feature writer, Schultz was now doing nationally televised interviews. “It was the highest day of my life,” she says. “I had worked for something and it was like, ‘I told you so, America.’” But by the next day, Schultz felt less gratified. “I didn’t want to celebrate,” she says. “I felt sad, guilty. I laid in bed and bawled. I knew I had betrayed him [Horton] probably in a way that no one had ever betrayed him.”

The wheels of justice rolled forward, but they soon fell off. Investigators were already batting with two strikes against them: Much of the physical evidence was destroyed in 1986 (one officer called it a “stupid housecleaning mistake”).

Worse yet, Chastain, a loose cannon from the start, began raining friendly fire on the prosecution. The convicted murderer admitted he told at least five versions of the story, including the most outlandish: that then-President Nixon and labor boss Jimmy Hoffa conspired to commit the murders. Chastain claimed he attended a meeting with Hoffa and then-presidential advisor Charles Colson, and that Nixon wanted Hoffa to collect incriminating microfilm from the victims. Echoing the thoughts of many, Lopossa called the tale “incredible.”

Nor did Schultz come away with reputation intact. After doing interviews on national TV with Dan Rather, she found herself ridiculed in her hometown press. Chastain’s bizarre testimony—that he’d fallen in love with Schultz and hoped to marry her—served as fodder for Star columnist Dick Cady, who implied that both Chastain and Horton were in love with her. As a court hearing approached, Cady wrote: “It could be the first time a judge has to decide whether love really is never having to say you’re sorry.”

Schultz took another hit when she testified that she was offered a movie contract. She said a company called Dream City Films contacted her about the possibility of doing a movie about her LaSalle Street investigation. Schultz signed the contract, which pledged to pay $150,000 if Horton were convicted, but in the end received one check for $900.

Judge Lopossa took a dim view of Chastain’s testimony and Schultz’s role in the investigation, particularly after learning that the writer had seen police files on the case. The judge alleged that Schultz used the files to feed Chastain information that he parroted when interviewed by investigators. Schultz, however, calls the charge “a lie from the pit of hell,” saying Chastain already had intimate knowledge of the slayings.

If Chastain had any credibility at that point, it could’t have survived the disclosure of a letter he wrote to Horton (a copy of which went to an Indianapolis police detective) in December 1995. Chastain’s correspondence, filled with misspellings, declares that neither he nor Horton was involved in the LaSalle Street murders: “I am sorry, but I have lied all a long. Trying to get my self out of prison, down here. And get a ride home to see my family ... I was not there. Never was.

“Well old buddy I sorry I lied on you,” Chastain continued in a postscript, “but I did get to come home, eat real good.”

Nor could the prosecution depend on the woman who said she saw the murders. Not only was she an alcoholic, Newman said, but the fact that she’d been hypnotized cast doubt on her recollections.

So that was that: The star witness was a liar; the other witness was an inebriate; the freelance writer was unprofessional; the prosecutor was out of ammo; and the suspect was free. And just as in 1971, whoever really committed the LaSalle Street murders had gotten away with it.

But any attempt to tie up this package with a red ribbon leaves a few corners sticking out. Consider these quandaries:

• Police admittedly lied to Horton when they told him, through Schultz, that his fingerprints were found in the home. Yet, according to officers, Horton claimed he was allowed to enter the house briefly as investigators probed the crime scene. Police insist that Horton never entered the house—so why would he say he was there?

• McAtee (who will no longer comment) said in 1993 that Chastain knew details only a perpetrator could have known. Other investigators privately agree, saying they still consider Horton the most likely suspect. Chastain is an admitted liar—but was he lying when he said he was involved in the crime, or when he said he wasn’t?

• In 1993, while still claiming to have participated, Chastain reportedly passed a lie-detector test in Florida.

• Schultz’s tires were slashed on April 28, the day before her deposition. If her investigation was off base, who would have reason to threaten her?

• Of all the twists in the case, the most preposterous-sounding is the alleged Nixon-Colson-Hoffa connection. Yet in a May 1996 letter to the court, Gierse’s brother Ted wrote, “My brother did meet and knew Jimmy Hoffa (Chicago 1966).”

Whatever is true, nothing about the current status quo feels completely satisfying. If Horton didn’t commit the crime, he wasted a month of his life in jail and was publicly branded a triple murderer. And numerous public servants will have spent countless hours and dollars chasing a 25-year-old wild goose from Indy to Florida and back.

If Horton did commit the crime, the utter collapse of the case makes it all but certain that he will never again be charged, let alone convicted—and ironically, Schultz, who originally hoped to solve the case, will have contributed to that outcome. On the other hand, if Horton is guilty, those who revere justice might take some solace in the fact that, by helping to put him behind bars for even a month, Schultz accomplished more than any police officer or prosecutor ever did.

If nothing else, Schultz can take credit for persistence. “She was obsessed with the case,” says Vidocq member Fred Bornhofen. “We recognized that and told her repeatedly that this is the wrong approach, that you have to be objective and professional about it,” says Bornhofen. “On the other hand, she showed us a thing or two about digging up evidence, and that too should be recognized. Every roadblock was placed in her path—lost physical evidence, lack of interest by the first prosecutor—yet she kept on going.” Vidocq’s Walter, however, contends Schultz went too far: “She ruined the case primarily by unprofessional conduct, leading Chastain and Horton on.”

Whatever once possessed Schultz has turned her loose. “The obsession is gone, the desire to prove I was right is gone,” she says. “I will never, ever pursue the LaSalle Street investigation again.”

But she doesn’t believe she was wrong. "For three years and nine months it was a hell of a game. And I was the only one to give him a run for his money in 25 years,” Schultz says of Horton. And while Chastain is an admitted liar, she still thinks he was telling the truth when he implicated himself in the murders. “Floyd Chastain lied about some things,” she says, “but I always knew when he was lying. I could tell by the change in his voice.”

The logical question is why Horton, if indeed guilty, would steer Schultz to Chastain. She contends that keeping tabs on her investigation gave him a pipeline to the police probe. In any case, Schultz says she’s glad the experience is over, adding that she no longer has faith in the American justice system.

On the wall of her mother’s kitchen is a plaque from Vidocq. presented to Schultz before the murder case came apart. “Everybody looked, but only you saw,” reads its inscription.

Did Carol Schultz really see anything—besides the fantasy world of a liar who wanted to “come home (and) eat real good”? As an investigator once told her, “Whores can be raped and liars can tell the truth.” Heaven knows whether rookie reporters can track down triple murderers on the first try.

This article appeared in the September 1996 issue.

IM CRIME FILES: Can This Doctor Be Saved?

by Kathleen Schuckel — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:06:00 GMT

Editor’s Note: The following originally appeared in the March 2004 issue of the magazine and is included among IM's Best-Ever Crime Stories.

Dr. Gabriel Rosenberg, who directed pediatrics at Methodist Hospital for 20 years, is one of Deborah Provisor’s staunchest supporters. He supervised Dr. Provisor when she was a medical resident, and later, when his daughter Laura was diagnosed with a brain tumor, he and his wife chose Provisor to oversee her care.

“If there were any better physician for my daughter, you can bet my wife and I would have found that person,” says Rosenberg, whose daughter died in 1989. “We could have gone out of state if we needed to. But we had the utmost confidence in Debby. And if we had to do it again, we’d pick her again —even knowing what we know now.”

What they know now is that Provisor is a convicted child molester. In February 1991, at the age of 43, she began a sexual relationship with her adopted 13-year-old son, Karl (not his real name). She eventually pleaded guilty to one Class D felony count of child abuse and in September 1993 was sentenced to 600 hours of community service. The following year, the Medical Licensing Board of Indiana suspended Provisor’s license for a minimum of four years.

Now, after performing the requisite community service, after undergoing years of therapy, after completing a sex-offender treatment program and after petitioning the board to have her license reinstated, Provisor has won the right to practice medicine again in Indiana —but with many strings attached. Her case has sparked heated debate within Indiana’s medical and legal communities. Does she pose a threat to patients? As a doctor, should she be held to a higher standard than other sex offenders? Can a child molester ever truly be rehabilitated? And when does the molester’s punishment end?

Deborah Provisor doesn’t fit the stereotype of a child molester. For one thing, she’s female. She’s the mother of four children. As a medical doctor, she’s a member of the country’s most trusted profession. And as a pediatric hematologist oncologist for more than 20 years, she has devoted her professional life to treating children with cancer.

Growing up on a farm in Putnam County, Provisor, the eldest of four children, knew by the time she was in junior high school that she wanted to be a doctor, like her grandfather and her own, female, physician. She was a leader at Bainbridge High School, where she graduated as salutatorian in 1965, and after earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Indiana University, she went to the Indiana University School of Medicine, did a post-graduate residency in pediatrics at Methodist Hospital, and then took a fellowship in pediatric hematology oncology at Riley Hospital for Children. Along the way, she married her high-school sweetheart, but by the time she finished medical school, the difference in their goals was apparent: He wanted to return to a rural area, but she hoped to specialize in cancer treatment and live in the city. Shortly after she completed medical school, they divorced. During her fellowship at Riley, she met Arthur Provisor, also a pediatric oncologist, the man who would become her second husband.

By 1991, Provisor had fulfilled her goal —she had her own practice in Indianapolis and the respect of her peers —but in both her professional and personal lives, all was not well. Several of her patients had recently died, and her marriage was strained. Arthur Provisor, who has since undergone therapy and marriage counseling, acknowledges that he was at times emotionally and verbally abusive to his wife, and that on two occasions he shoved her.

“That was at a time in my life where [my husband] was considering coming in to join me in the practice,” Provisor would later testify before the medical board. “I felt like the little duck in the little pond who is going to be overrun by the big duck. He was a full-fledged professor at IU. That is very intimidating. Very scary to me.” Between the emotional difficulties of her work, the specter of her husband taking over her practice, and her anger at her husband’s abuse, Provisor was at a low point in her life. As a result, she told the board, “I sought solace in a very inappropriate lover.”

At 13, Karl was the oldest of the Provisors’ four children (two sons, two daughters), three of whom are adopted. By all accounts, Karl was a troubled boy. His parents and doctors say he was performing poorly in school, lying, destroying property, and behaving aggressively toward others. The Provisors would later assume some of the blame for his problems, saying they didn’t set enough limits or show enough consistency in their parenting. At the time, however, all they saw was a son who was out of control.

One day, 13-year-old Karl asked his mother to smooth lotion on a skin rash he’d developed on his thighs. As she did so, he got an erection. She brushed against it (asked whether her action was accidental or intentional, she says she doesn’t remember). Afterward, Karl became more affectionate towards his mother, frequently touching and cuddling her. To her it seemed that during this time he was more respectful, more cooperative, and less impulsive. Eventually, he began asking her to have sex with him, becoming more persistent until she consented. Over a period of three weeks, Provisor had intercourse with Karl three times.

Provisor has since said that the sexual encounters were like an “out of body” experience, something she tried to depersonalize and disassociate herself from. Following each encounter, she felt repulsed and guilty, and she feared what her husband would do if he found out. But as she later explained to one of her psychologists, she had somehow convinced herself that this sort of closeness might have some beneficial effect. Whereas before Karl had been distant from his siblings and parents, he now seemed more interested in family life in general.

Still, after the third encounter —immediately after —Provisor told her son it would never happen again. For the next two years, she says, she was ravaged by guilt, especially as it became apparent that Karl’s psychological problems were worsening. In March 1993, the Provisors took their son to the St. Vincent Stress Center. During the intake session, he got upset when his father started listing all the things Karl had done wrong; in response, he told the doctor about having sex with his mother. In hindsight, Provisor would say she was relieved, having already assumed that her transgression would come to light during Karl’s treatment. She now says she wanted him to tell because she couldn’t live with the constant guilt.

Provisor confessed and was arrested and charged with two counts of child molesting —one Class C felony and one Class D felony. On May 19, 1993, she pleaded guilty to the Class D felony in a plea agreement. Though she could have been sentenced to three years in prison, she received a three-year suspended sentence with three years’ probation and was ordered to perform 600 hours of community service. Andrea Hern, president of the Indiana chapter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, says that, in her opinion, the court went easy on Provisor; Hern would have expected a three-year prison sentence, with only half of it suspended —in other words, 18 months in jail.

But in fact, Provisor’s punishment was only beginning. In March 1994, the Medical Licensing Board of Indiana voted 3-2-1 to suspend her license to practice medicine in Indiana (after having enacted an emergency suspension of the license in April 1993, then reinstating it —with restrictions —in May until formal hearings could be held). Provisor and her attorneys appealed the 1994 suspension, and a judge allowed her to continue practicing medicine until the case was resolved. In the end, though, she lost her final appeal before the Indiana Supreme Court in May 1997, at which point she was banned from practicing in the state for a minimum of four years.

Karl is now 26 years old, and for all the attention his mother’s case has received, he believes that people who “know” the story don’t really understand it. “Everyone who found out treated it like I was a little girl —a 12-year-old girl whose father had tied me up and raped me,” he says. “It was totally opposite anything like that.”

Sitting beside his mother on the sectional couch in his parents’ large, brick northwestside home, Karl resembles a lumberjack in a red-checked fleece pullover, if lumberjacks wore designer tennis shoes. Over six feet tall, he sports a honey-colored goatee that blends into his pale skin. Friendly and quick with a handshake, he laughs easily as he pets the cat that jumps into his lap. He’s decided, he says, not to worry about how others view him: “I just don’t give a shit what people think.”

The family room is cozy; a second friendly cat also approaches to be fussed over. In the breakfast nook hangs a painting by local artist Nancy Noel. Handsome family photos taken at bat and bar mitzvahs cover most of one dining-room wall. Out back, there’s an in-ground swimming pool and a large sandbox that looks like it hasn’t seen much use since the four Provisor children were small. It’s an affluent neighborhood, just around the bend from the estate of Indianapolis Motor Speedway president Tony George. Arthur Provisor no longer lives in the house —he moved out in 1998 and now lives and practices medicine in another state —but he remains one of his wife’s strongest champions. The couple have no plans to divorce; they describe their relationship as a commuting marriage.

At 57, Provisor is a petite woman with short, wavy brown hair and glasses that overwhelm her pixie-like face. Sitting next to Karl, she says she doesn’t know if she thought sex with him would be less wrong given that he’s not her biological son. She and her husband adopted Karl when he was only 2 days old, and she saw him as her son from the very beginning. But Karl thinks that being adopted was a factor for him. “I believe initially my being adopted is what made it okay in my mind,” he says. He understands now that what happened was wrong, but at the time, he says, it didn’t seem like abuse.

Among the types of female sex offenders, Provisor is classified as a “teacher/lover,” a type experts regard as highly treatable. “Most mothers who sexually abuse their sons are not predatory pedophiles. They do not seek out other people’s children for sexual exploition.”

On the face of it, Karl seems to have made a decent life for himself. He works nights for a large discount store. He has an apartment and a couple of dogs; he likes sports and music. He’s been with the same girlfriend for five years. But over the years he’s had his share of troubles. He dropped out of high school, he’s been charged with drunken driving, and he still has difficulties controlling his temper. (“I’m a retaliatory person,” he says. “If someone wrongs me, I have to wrong them back.”) Yet he insists that his problems aren’t related to his mother’s sexual abuse. At 13, he says, he was already hanging out with the wrong crowd, skipping school, lying, and having issues with his temper. He was already showing signs of attention deficit disorder. He’d already been seeing therapists and had already been diagnosed with oppositional-defiant disorder.

But if he refuses to blame his mother’s actions for his personal problems, Karl readily acknowledges his difficulty in dealing with the publicity that surrounded the case, especially the television coverage. Kids at school stared at him or giggled behind his back. Someone once tossed a rock in front of his high-school girlfriend; attached to the rock with a rubber band was a newspaper article about his mother.

Karl chews on his fingernails as he says, “I think we would have been better off, much happier, if this never came out. My mother lost her job, my father moved away—”

Here, Provisor interrupts. “I don’t want you to think your telling broke up our family. What I did was wrong, honey.” Suddenly, she’s teary eyed. “It was tragic. But I’ve told you how sorry I am, and you’ve forgiven me. We’ve made our peace. It’s just that the world’s not ready to let it go.”

“I don’t understand that,” Karl says.

Among the types of female sex offenders, Provisor is classified as a “teacher/lover,” as is Seattle teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, whose case made headlines in the 1990s. Today Letourneau is serving seven and a half years in prison after having had sex with a 13-year-old student in 1996 and 1997 and giving birth to two of his children. She is due to be released this year.

According to experts, a teacher/lover is not hostile toward her victim; on the contrary, she believes that her actions are nurturing and loving, not abusive. Because she harbors no malice toward the child, the teacher/lover also has a difficult time recognizing her behavior as criminal, says Ruth Mathews, a Minneapolis-based psychologist who heads an adult female sexual-offender program in Minnesota that has treated some 100 women.

A teacher/lover typically sees the relationship as consensual at a time when she’s experiencing stress or hardship with a significant other or spouse, as was the case with Provisor. “Because of their relationship difficulties and accompanying low self esteem, the teacher/lovers appear to elevate adolescents to adult status and see themselves as equals,” Mathews explained in a letter to Marion County Superior Court Judge Webster Brewer, who sentenced Provisor in September 1993. “Since most of the victims of teacher/lovers have been somewhat troubled adolescents, the victims are vulnerable to and respond to the female’s attention, support, and care. The female interprets this response as love and consent ... At the time of their offending, they have little understanding of their misuse of authority.”

After Provisor sought out Mathews for counsel, the two women met in Provisor’s attorney’s office. Mathews, not mincing words, told the doctor this: “A minor —no matter what they say —can never give consent. It’s abuse.”

“Those words just haunt me to this day,” Provisor would later say. “I could never [again] delude myself into thinking that a minor was capable of consent. I am responsible. It’s not his fault.” She has also said that therapy and treatment in a sex-offender program taught her that the way she once regarded her son —as a “lover” —was wholly inappropriate. “That’s how I viewed [Karl] at the time. Now I don’t. He is my child, my son. He wasn’t a lover.”

Usually when people think of sex offenders, they think of men, but a 1991 study, “Women and Men Who Sexually Abuse Children: A Comparative Analysis,” by Craig Alien, estimates that about 1.5 million American females and 1.6 million American males may have been sexually abused by a woman.

It’s hard to pin down the numbers, though, because as study after study reveals, cases of sexual abuse are woefully underreported —perhaps fewer than 10 percent —and of those, less than 3 percent are ever prosecuted, according to the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse.

Cases involving female offenders are the most underreported, says Andrea Hern, head of Indiana’s Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. That’s in part because physical evidence is rare, and in part because males are generally reluctant to report that they’ve been abused. Of course, a male is especially unlikely to report sex abuse when the offender is his mother. If he does so, it’s usually after years of therapy, because the taboo against mother-son sex is simply too strong. As licensed clinical social worker Christine Lawson points out, it’s no accident that “motherfucker” is among the most damning things you can call an American man.

Lawson, who practices in Zionsville, holds a doctorate in family studies and has written on the subject of mother-son sexual abuse. “We have this incredibly strong bias about men’s tendency to idolize their mothers,” she says. “It’s been my experience as a long-term therapist that the very last thing a male patient is willing to talk about is his relationship with his mother.”

As a result, experts simply don’t know how common mother-son sexual abuse is. Researchers have struggled to identify, let alone study, a large group of males abused by females, especially those abused by their mothers. Even defining what constitutes such abuse is problematic. Lawson points to a 2002 study of maternal sexual abuse that noted that mother-son sexual abuse “was likely to be subtle, involving behaviors that may be difficult to distinguish from normal caregiving (e.g. genital touching), despite the potentially serious long-term consequences.”

Research also shows that adopted children such as Karl suffer abuse by adult family members more often than biological children. Dr. Shelvy Haywood Keglar, an Indianapolis clinical psychologist who has frequently counseled adoptive families and consulted with the state on special-needs adoption issues, says that an abusing relative who doesn’t have blood ties to an adopted child may believe that the abuse therefore isn’t incest. And in legal terms, in fact, it’s not. Indiana law defines incest, a Class C felony, as “sexual intercourse or deviate sexual conduct with another person ... related to the person biologically as a parent, child, grandparent, grandchild, sibling, aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew”; if the victim is younger than 16, the crime is a Class B felony.

But in terms of the potential for emotional and psychological damage, Keglar argues that Karl’s being adopted matters little. Because he was only 2 days old when he was adopted, the psychologist says, the abuse was effectively incest.

In August 2002, four years after losing her final appeal before the Indiana Supreme Court, Provisor applied to have her license reinstated. “I apologize to you,” she told the medical licensing board. “I apologized to [my son]. I live every day with the guilt and the shame ... I cannot offer you any excuses. I will not minimize my offense. I will not deny it, nor will I transpose my guilt onto anyone else. Certainly I would never repeat such an act again with anyone.”

In the years since she was convicted, Provisor has apologized repeatedly during public medical-board hearings, some of them televised. She has submitted to IQ tests and a battery of psychological analyses. For two years following her abuse of Karl, she attended Prevail, a Noblesville support group for battered women. She keeps a thick file of letters from patients, fellow doctors, and her family, including Karl—letters attesting to her compassion, her intelligence, and her empathy. She’s seen numerous psychologists, completed sex-offender workshops, attended Prevent Child Abuse Indiana conferences, and struggled to help her own four children deal with their emotional turmoil and shame, much of it stemming from media intrusion into their private lives.

But despite her contrition, the board, in 2002, voted 4-2 against reinstating Provisor’s license. It was a difficult hearing. Provisor tried to represent herself, but she didn’t know the protocol well, and doctors on the board were not convinced that her sole witness—a clinical psychologist who acknowledged that he hadn’t conducted a clinical evaluation to determine whether Provisor was a pedophile —was sufficiently expert on sexual predators.

It wasn’t until more than a year later, in October 2003, that the board reinstated Provisor’s license. But the license is provisional, and it comes with serious strings. Under the terms of what the board calls “indefinite probation,” Provisor must appear before the board monthly for two years and quarterly thereafter; complete 50 hours of continuing medical education each year (including 10 hours on sexual-abuse and “boundary” issues such as appropriate doctor-patient relationships); and continue to see her psychologist on a regular basis, with the psychologist submitting quarterly reports on her progress, current treatment, and prognosis. She is barred from having an independent private practice (she must be part of a multi-doctor practice). She cannot treat a patient under the age of 18 unless an adult chaperone is present in the room (the chaperone must be a member of the healthcare staff; a patient’s parent or guardian doesn’t count).

Provisor says she can live with most of the stipulations, even the one that mandates continuing treatment by her psychologist (though she has told the board that she and the psychologist think the requirement unnecessary because she doesn’t need more treatment for this issue). But she is seeking to have some restrictions lifted. The board has stipulated, for instance, that before Provisor can practice medicine again, she must first undergo a medical-knowledge assessment by the Center for Personalized Education for Physicians, in Colorado; the assessment would essentially be a test of whether Provisor knows what she needs to know to be a doctor. The problem is, the CPEP doesn’t assess doctors on general knowledge; they have to be tested in the area in which they’re currently practicing —and Provisor is not only not practicing, she doesn’t even know what her eventual practice might be.

She wants to return to her original specialty, pediatric oncology, but it’s not at all clear whether that will be feasible —in large part because of another string attached to her provisional license. The board is requiring that, if and when Provisor practices again, every one of her patients —or those patients’ guardians, as the case may be —sign a form acknowledging that they are aware of her status as a convicted child molester. Provisor says that having to comply with the mandate will make her unemployable —that no practice would want her. She’s in the process of amassing letters from potential employers who say she can’t be hired with the written-notification stipulation, in their practice or, in their opinion, anywhere; one is from the former commissioner of the Indiana State Board of Health, who now directs the St. Francis Family Practice Residency. Provisor planned to appear before the full board in late February, letters in hand.

Dr. Rosenberg, Provisor’s early mentor and the longtime head of Methodist pediatrics, is outraged by the hoops the board is telling his protege to jump through. “She’s paid her penalty four-fold,” he says. “She may as well walk around with a scarlet letter on her chest.”

But Georgeanna Orlich sees things differently. Orlich was an Indiana deputy attorney general in August 2002 when she spoke out strongly against Provisor’s getting her license back at all. “Probably most disturbing to the state was the connection between the teacher/lover typology and ... a high-school coach,” Orlich said in her closing statement to the licensing board during Provisor’s first attempt to get her license back. “A high-school coach who has an improper relationship with his student loses [his] job. [He loses] the right to have that privilege.”

Practicing medicine is a hard-earned privilege, reserved only for those willing and able to complete years of grueling preparation. Not surprisingly, doctors tend to be highly respected and trusted. In fact, annual Gallup polls show that Americans trust members of the medical profession more than any other. But in order to practice medicine, must a doctor therefore be beyond reproach?

Provisor thinks not. “Don’t you believe people can make mistakes?” she asks. “I’m human, no different from anyone else.”

In practice for 43 years, Rosenberg has seen his share of human frailty in the medical profession. He points to the case of an Indianapolis physician who in 1983 received a one-year suspended sentence for molesting an adolescent girl; the doctor was put on probation for three years and required to receive counseling, but he was allowed to continue practicing medicine. Rosenberg also knows of physicians addicted to alcohol or drugs —male physicians who continue to practice despite the fact that their addictions threaten the safety of their patients. And even when they’re penalized by the medical board, he points out, these male doctors aren’t subsequently required to disclose their addictions to their patients. (The Indiana Health Professions Bureau is just beginning to keep statistics on disciplinary actions taken against doctors. Lisa Hayes, who heads the bureau, says that in Indiana, the most common reasons for such actions include the doctor’s having been disciplined by a medical board in another state, drug abuse on the doctor’s part, incompetence in practicing medicine, or overprescribing addictive medications.)

Unlike doctors whose substance abuse directly affects their actual practice of medicine, and unlike doctors who overprescribe addictive medications, Provisor’s offense occurred outside her medical work. And she’s never been the subject of a single patient complaint. For these reasons, Rosenberg, along with others in the local medical community, is convinced that Provisor is the victim of a gender-based double standard. “There’s no question that she’s being made an example of,” he says.

However, it could be that Provisor is just unlucky enough to find herself at the beginning of what may be a new era of harsh treatment for doctors who commit sexual offenses. In 2002, The Dallas Morning News investigated sexual abuse by Texas doctors and found that most were allowed to continue practicing medicine with few or no restrictions. As a result of the scathing articles, major reforms are underway in Texas, where more doctors are now being penalized for sexual offenses.

Nationwide, about 200 doctors are disciplined by state medical boards for sexual misconduct each year, according to statistics compiled by the Federation of State Medical Boards. The numbers aren’t broken down by gender, but abuse by female physicians is rare, says Dale Austin, senior vice president for the Dallas-based federation. Statistics for Indiana were unavailable.

Asked if Provisor’s situation poses a civil-liberties question, John Krull, outgoing executive director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, says not exactly. “The medical profession has a right to police itself and put ethical standards in place. She may have freedom as a citizen but not have freedom to practice medicine.” Still, Krull would like to see Provisor’s case handled in an ethical fashion. “There’s got to be some appeals process in which she can demonstrate that she is no longer a threat,” he says. “You can’t have selective enforcement.”

In Krull’s eyes, Provisor’s objection to having to tell her patients about her sex-offender past is similar to the ICLU’s stance against Indiana’s sex-offender registry. It’s one thing, he says, if someone is deemed a threat to society and sentenced to life in prison. But if that person is sentenced to five years in prison and serves his or her time, society shouldn’t add on additional penalties.

Provisor agrees. She has difficulty understanding why she had to lose her medical license in the first place, especially given that she’d already been sentenced in criminal court, had performed her community service —and was still accepted as a worthwhile member of the community. After her conviction, Provisor continued as a room mother in one of her children’s classes. She still volunteered with North Central High School extracurricular groups, such as the choir, and with other nonprofit youth groups. And despite knowing about Provisor’s crime, the parents of her children’s friends still let them come to slumber parties and sleepovers at the Provisors’ house.

To Provisor, it’s clear that she poses no danger to children —her own or those she might one day treat —and she’s eager to begin practicing medicine again. She believes that her experience, and all that she’s learned about herself in its aftermath, will make her a better doctor. “I’ve been a victim. I’ve been a perpetrator,” she told the medical board. “I’ve seen the effects, and I think if anything, it makes me a more competent and more compassionate physician.”

Her family is likewise eager —indeed impatient —to see her at work again. “The medical licensing board has become judge, jury, and executioner in the case of my wife,” Arthur Provisor says. “They won’t let my wife have redemption.” He is especially frustrated by the stipulation that she notify every patient of her sex-offender conviction. “By placing this restriction on her, it’s like they’re giving the license back in one hand and then taking it away in the other.”

The longer Arthur talks, the more agitated he becomes. It’s clear that he’s fed up with lawyer bills and with licensing-board members who fail to see what an outstanding doctor his wife is. He can’t understand why she’s been penalized so severely while physicians guilty of gross malpractice have, as he says, escaped punishment by the board. “She is the best physician I ever met,” he says, and adds that he still consults with her about cases. “She could no more harm a patient or sexually assault a patient than could the man in the moon.”

One of Provisor’s daughters wrote in a letter to the medical board, “My mother has apologized to all of us for the heartache her offense has caused. We have forgiven her. Why can’t you?”

“It just wasn’t fair that she lost her license,” Karl says. “What she did had nothing to do with her work.”

For some observers, the real question raised by Provisor’s provisional license is whether a child molester can ever truly be rehabilitated.

Andrea Marshall, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse Indiana, says no: “There isn’t any known cure or proven treatment for sexual-abuse perpetrators.” Just as a recovering alcoholic shouldn’t work in a bar or a gambling addict in a casino, says Marshall, a doctor who has sexually abused a child should not be allowed to provide treatment to children again.

Other child-abuse experts are more equivocal. “Treatment does work,” says Andrea Hern, president of Indiana’s Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. Hern has specialized in treating sex offenders for more than 15 years, first in private practice and now as director of the Indiana Sex Offender Managing and Monitoring Program in the Department of Correction. Though she’s never had a medical doctor as a client, she has worked with two nurses —one male, one female —who lost their licenses because of sexual offenses with minors. Both appeared before the licensing board, which prohibited them from ever again working with children. Both are practicing nurses today.

The key to successful treatment, says Hern, is that it must be highly specialized. General therapy doesn’t work and can even make the sexual offender worse. A quality sex-offender program is victim-focused. It requires total accountability on the part of the offender and much written work and reflection outside the therapist’s office. Research shows that of sex offenders who complete the right kind of program, only 17 percent will abuse again, compared to 36 percent of those who receive no treatment. In some programs, the recidivism rate is even lower; Hern reports 7 percent in hers.

The program Provisor completed —run by Midtown Mental Health, part of Wishard Hospital —is one that meets with Hern’s approval. Bryon Ross, who headed the program for nine years in the 1980s and ‘90s, estimates that he treated 700 offenders, only about a half-dozen of whom —including Provisor —were female. “She made excellent progress,” Ross says. “What made her a good client was her willingness to learn, her openness to other points of view, her willingness to do the work and take responsibility for the behavior she committed.

“Can she safely practice medicine?” he asks. “Yes, she can. She’s made enough progress that her risk is next to zero.” Still, he says it would be inaccurate to say that she’s “cured,” because the term simply doesn’t apply to behavior. “With any good treatment program, you can never say ‘never’ in terms of future behavior.”

Experts also point out that not all child-molesters are created equal. As Minneapolis psychologist Ruth Mathews wrote in a 1993 letter to the judge in Provisor’s case, “Historically, we have found the teacher/lover to be the most treatable subtype of adult female sex offender within our program ... We know of no recidivism among the teacher/lovers we have treated.”

Dr. Lawson notes that the incestuous nature of Provisor’s crime is a factor, too. “Most mothers who sexually abuse their sons are not predatory pedophiles,” she says. “They do not seek out other people’s children for sexual exploitation.”

Ross concurs. “A person who molests inside the home is less likely to molest outside the home,” he says.

Lawson also believes that the son’s emotional health should be considered when authorities are penalizing the mother for her offense. “The child may regret reporting abuse and may suffer additional trauma, shame, guilt and self-blame if the mother is harshly punished ... Sons who experience subtle sexual abuse by their mothers within the context of caregiving simply want the abuse to stop; they do not want their mothers to be punished. The whole point of child protection is to protect children from being traumatized by adults.”

Indeed, in a letter to the medical board, Karl indicated that the sexual abuse he suffered long ago was far less upsetting to him than the violation of his family’s privacy, the experience of his mother’s grief, and the loss of income resulting from her suspended medical license.

Arthur Provisor agrees that the public and professional scrutiny has only made matters worse. In fact, he thinks that when Karl originally told doctors that his mother had sexually abused him, her best course would have been to deny it. The denials would have hurt Karl, Arthur says, but far less than the public scrutiny did. And the rest of the family would have been spared much suffering. “There’s no doubt in my mind that it would have been better for the whole family if Debby had never admitted to this,” he says. Karl himself now says that if a boy who’d been sexually abused by his mother asked him for advice, he’d tell that boy to keep his mouth shut.

Illustration by Arthur Giron

This story appeared in the March 2004 issue.

IM CRIME FILES: The Scourge

by Tony Rehagen — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:00:00 GMT

Editor’s Note: The following originally appeared in the October 2005 “Small Towns” issue and is included among IM's Best-Ever Crime Stories.

To outsiders, Petersburg, Indiana is little more than a straight three-mile stretch of State Highway 57, dubbed, simply, Main Street. Three of the town’s four traffic lights—four of five, if you count the blinking yellow at the intersection of 12th Street—are spaced along this artery to regulate traffic to and from the library, the courthouse, City Hall and the Sheriff’s Department, both of the town’s bars, its McDonald’s and Dairy Queen, both of its pharmacies, its liquor store, the largest of its three grocery stores, and its Dollar General. But one adventuresome turn from Main Street and its facades will lead you to a different Petersburg: a town of modest two-stories, ranches whose paint is chipped and fading, farmhouses and outlying trailer parks where its 2,570 people live; of suffocating out-county coal mines, thick corn and soybean fields, and a shroud of gray-and-purple smoke that spews from the towering stacks of the power plant where most of the residents work. Most of them are poor; about 10 percent live in poverty. Ninety-two percent don’t have a college degree, and a third didn’t graduate from high school. Their children keep Pike County at or near the top of the state’s annual list of dropout rates.

At night, the teens and twentysomethings of Petersburg spill forth onto Main Street from the back blocks and gravel roads. They gather in cliques on the street corners and in front of the bars and convenience stores, smoking cigarettes and looking to get laid. The minors wait for a passing adult to buy them booze or perhaps hook them up with something stronger. Those with cars and trucks pick up their friends and roll the streets in search of a fix, an escape, something to do. “Ain’t shit to do in this town besides drink, fight, smoke pot, or shoot dope,” says Mike Woodland, a devout student of all four schools of passing time, and at 30, an almost lifelong citizen of Petersburg and this scene. He knows the dope, the meth, is especially popular here, and not just among the youth on these small-town streets.

Methamphetamine came to town 20 years ago, when locals first learned that they could take a pitcher of anhydrous ammonia—liquefied nitrogen fertilizer—from a nearby farm, some lithium batteries, ether, and a couple boxes of sinus pills and make electric, chemical bliss. The drug accelerates the addiction process, taking hold of its users and leaving them exhausted, empty, and emaciated, desperate for another fix. Today this once-fringe drug has the entire county in a lockjaw grip. Since 1999, officials in Pike County—Indiana’s 85th most populous—have seized 95 meth iambs, 13th most in a state that is second in the nation. And Sheriff Todd Meadors says those are only the labs his department has stumbled upon. The county can’t afford the training or equipment for a meth-specific task force. Even so, nine of 10 Pike County arrests are meth-related.

The police reports posted in Petersburg’s weekly paper, the Press-Dispatch, are bulging with meth busts. The houses of 60-year-old men are being raided as meth labs. Third- and fourth-generation babies are born every day with the dope in their bodies, in their blood. Meth affects everyone, knows no boundary of class or gender. It’s now so prevalent that it’s impinging upon even those who’ve never used it: the elderly woman who goes to CVS to fill a prescription and has to wait in line behind people who must show ID to buy Sudafed; the mother who calls 911 because her toddler stepped on a discarded syringe in the park; the mushroom-hunters who fear that they’ll stumble across a meth lab and its tweaked, paranoid, gun-toting owner; the children left fatherless while Daddy goes to prison for methamphetamine. Daily, social workers remove children from clandestine labs—pulling them starving from where they sit on scorched carpet beside burnt spoons and needles, immune to the noxious stench of anhydrous that causes visitors to retch upon first contact, their parents either too spaced out or too focused on chasing the high to care. In this town, there’s no escape.

July 12. Woodland is a prisoner: Indiana Department of Correction number 156277, doing three years for conspiracy to manufacture and deal methamphetamine, a class B felony. He’s been in and out of this jail eight times in the last 10 years, doing weeks and months at a time for random drug charges. This is his third felony. A fourth will categorize him as a habitual offender, a tag that carries a mandatory sentence of at least 20 years.

Less than two weeks into his latest sentence, he sits in the Pike County Jail on Main Street in Petersburg, enjoying the air-conditioning he didn’t have in his mother’s trailer less than a mile down the road, reading paperback Westerns to fill the empty hours. A lean, muscular man, he does push-ups and sit-ups to stay in shape and burn his pent-up energy and frustration. He’s jittery, sometimes breaking into small bursts of nervous laughter when he talks. He constantly crosses and uncrosses his arms. He can’t seem to sit still. His sharp brown eyes are always wide and frantic, darting this way and that, as if he’s constantly surveying his surroundings. When he gets worked up, his unpredictability unnerves even his family.

Woodland is waiting to be sent up to a state penitentiary, which may not happen for some time. The DOC is currently housing almost 2,000 inmates in Indiana county jails due to overcrowding, which in turn is due largely to the increase in meth arrests. Indiana taxpayers spend an extra $35 per day per DOC inmate bloused in county jails. Pike County Jail pulls in between $300,000 and $400,000 a year housing DOC inmates. A facility that usually bolds about 60 now keeps 83 behind its bars. Inmates sleep on the floor.

Woodland says he won’t mind being sent to the pen, where at least he’ll have contact visits with his family. He could kiss his wife. He could hold his daughters—18-month-old Kaitlyn and 20-month-old Madison—instead of watching them cry and press kisses against the glass of the jail’s visitation room. He misses them, longs to bold them.

Kaitlyn and Madison are the reasons he’s in here. If not for them, he would have fled, lived as a fugitive in the woods or in some rural county in Illinois. He wants to get this over with. “I got to get out and get clean so I can be a father to my girls,” he says. “The longer I drag it out, the older they’re going to be when I get out.” But as much as he loves his daughters, he also loves the drug. In jail, just as outside, he thinks about it every day: the prick of the needle in his muscular arm, the slow drive of the fluid into his throbbing vein as he presses the plunger. The rush as it courses to his heart. Eyes wide, pulse racing as his beard pumps the bliss through him, biting every inch of his body, each extremity tingling beneath a tin glaze of sweat, a thousand simultaneous bursts of adrenaline, euphoria, as if his very soul were about to tear free. It’s like walking barefoot on a bed of cotton. Some women experience immediate orgasm with a single hit. “It makes me a wild, slobbering animal,” Woodland says. “It makes me feel fucking invincible.”

Sitting in jail, Woodland feels anything but invincible. He feels weak, despicable. He curses himself for giving in to his vices, for letting his family, his daughters, down. He is wracked by constant headaches that jail-issued Tylenol can’t kick. Still, he’s safer in here than he is outside. In here, he’s safe from himself. He’s free from the temptation, the knowledge that he could make one or two phone calls, catch a ride into the woods, and in 4 or 5 hours be chasing that high again.

The inmates around Woodland talk constantly about dope. They swap recipes, talk about bow they’ll shoot up or smoke out the minute they get out. It’s all they can think of, despite the drug’s ruinous effect on their bodies. Their teeth are rotting and decayed from meth’s lithium and sulfuric acid. They suffer burns, chest pains, nausea, and shortness of breath from smoking and snorting it. They’re malnourished; meth-heads, or geekers, don’t eat. This year, Meadors has had to turn to the county for more tax money—$40,000—to pay for his inmates’ extensive medical care. Meth has taken these inmates’ children, their jobs, their health, and their freedom. Yet all they care about is the fix. As Woodland says, “When you do dope, you forget about the things you really love.”

June 1. The hollow, unstained wooden door to Woodland’s mother’s trailer will barely close. Light creeps into the small home through the gaps between bent door and straight frame, through cracks in the thin wood itself, and is filtered trough the strips of freezer tape patched over the fist-shaped holes and boot-sized dents. No one broke in. The door is hardly ever locked. The damage was done from inside. These quarters are cramped and stuffy, choked with enough furniture and cluttered belongings to fill an apartment twice the size. Though a bit claustrophobic, the front room and adjoining kitchen feel homey, as well-kept as one could expect from a single mother who works full-time. The warm smell of roast beef is thick in the air.

Woodland sits at the kitchen table shirtless, sun from the bay window illuminating dozens of ornate tattoos—skulls, bikes, and tribal markings all connecting to form a continuous work assembled on his arms, shoulders, back and best. A sprawling pictorial journal built symbol by symbol over the course of a couple of years: a Harley on his right forearm; an hourglass on his left bicep, symbolizing the jail time he’s already done; 1935-2004—the dates of his grandma’s life—in black on the back of his neck. He leans anxiously over a plate of beef, out-of-the-box mac and cheese, and canned baked beans, right leg shaking incessantly beneath the table. His mother, Shirley, gaunt and frail, stands at a distance against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, quietly watching her son shovel food into his mouth. Her tan skin is wrapped tight on her bony frame, the lines on her face revealing an aging far beyond her years. She’s glad to see her Mikey eat.

Shirley and Mike are close. For years, they watched each other suffer the abusive mouth and hand of Mike’s father, a man who they allege grew pot and drank too much. Shirley finally left him six years ago, in time to save her youngest son, Cody, but too late for herself and Mikey. Trading on his father’s name, Mikey started smoking weed at age 13, a habit that led to pill-popping, cocaine, and alcohol abuse. He was open with his mother about his addictions, and she did what she could to help him cope. She supported him, and he never raised a hand to her. But when Mike’s habit evolved into shooting and eventually cooking meth a few years ago, things changed. Mikey changed, or rather, the dope changed him. “He’d go through violent mood swings,” Shirley says. “He was hateful to me. It was like he was a completely different person.”

After the initial surge of the drug settles in, Mikey crawls inside his own mind, obsessing, analyzing and re-analyzing every glance he catches from those around him; every laugh, it seems, may be directed at him. His paranoia makes him angry. Awake for days, he has nothing but time to think and rethink everything. He sees things that aren’t there. Or are they? He sees “shadow people” lurking in the comers, watching him. Any little sound, the snap of a twig, clearing of a throat, can set him off. Then he’s on you, in your face, gun to your bead. “Are you a rat!? Are you a cop!?” He trusts no one, not even his own family. It’s this paranoid effect of meth that makes addicts so dangerous. Meadors says 90 percent of them carry guns. Three years ago, a Pike County geeker shot and killed an Oakland City police officer who had pulled him over.

They set up cameras and elaborate surveillance systems on their houses. Some have set up booby traps and trap doors, even triggered explosives to take care of the cops they’re sure are lurking outside. They’re strung out, the speed keeping them up around the clock. When they’re on the road and suspect they’re being followed, they drive like maniacs to evade phantom authorities.

Making matters worse is that there is no honor among addicts. Busted teachers will sell out their own blood, ratting out cookers and dealers to the cops in order to lessen their own charges. The result is a kind of Wild West atmosphere that puts the already mistrustful dopers further on edge.

When tweaked, Mikey has held his family hostage for fear that they’d run to the cops. He’s held a gun to his mother’s head in her black Ford Contour, forcing her to drive him and his equipment to the woods so he could cook up a batch, threatening to shoot them both if a cop pulled her over. As it turns out, it was his mother’s boyfriend, a customer of Mikey’s, who ratted him out when he got arrested in October 2004. That’s how Mikey got slapped with his third felony and the $3,000 bond that his wife, Melissa, posted so he could sit in his mother’s kitchen, eat dinner, and await his sentencing in late June.

Meth made Shirley scared of her own son. What terrified her most was the drug’s fallout—when, after days or weeks, the drug’s speed wore off, leaving Mikey weak, strung-out, and desperate. She’s still reeling from the latest crash. All she has to do is look at her beat-in front door.

May 24. He wants to die. He has the shotgun in his mouth and is ready to pull the trigger. The destructive rage that began at his mother’s house has turned inward. At the tail end of a week-long meth rush, Mikey is utterly alone, unraveled, at his mind’s end. He’s also drunk His brain is numb, consumed by the prospect of prison, the thought of abandoning his baby girls. Frayed, scalding, he’s sure his mother’s neighbors on Sixth Street have called the cops. They always do. They had to have heard him cursing and screaming, slamming his fists and feet into the door. He’s out on bond. That’s why he fled, here, to his friend’s house more than a mile away, where he found this shotgun; he just can’t find a shell. Not one single fucking shell! He’s beyond reason. Rifling through the drawers, he finds the pills. Four bottles: Xanax, Klonopin, Amitriptyline, Darvocet. He shoves handfuls in his mouth, chews them up, swallows. Leaves. Finds his way to the house of a cousin, who calls Shirley at work at the nursing home and then drops Mikey off there. In the passenger seat of the Contour on the way to the hospital, he passes out on his mother’s lap. No response. Ambulance. Hospital. Pupils fixed. No response. Shirley says goodbye.

Two days later, Mikey opens his eyes. He recognizes his grandpa standing over him. Doctors unhook his IV, and he is released. But something inside him has changed. For the first time, Mikey finds within himself a sincere desire to get off the dope. He sees the frightened faces of his family, the tear-drenched face of his mother; he envisions his girls growing up without him. He knows he has to get clean. He knows he needs help.

June 1. Meth labs bespeak a poor man’s chemistry. There are no beakers, Bunsen burners or test tubes, no men in white coats. Coffee filters, hot plates, aluminum foil, batteries, cold pills. Mason jars, buckets, rubber hoses, coolers, pitcher, and fertilizer are the tools of the trade. All are legal to buy and possess. All can be found at the local Walmart—except the anhydrous, which cookers can readily get from local farms. Some may find a farmer willing to trade it for dope, but most take to the farm and co-op tanks at night, draining the gas into a 20-pound propane tank or siphoning it in liquid form, stealing a pitcher-full here and a cooler-full there. Some cookers refer to the heist from these long white farm tanks as “riding the white buffalo.”

Mikey loves that ride, the exhilaration of the job, sneaking up on the beast and squeezing out a few gallons, and running off into the night to cook. Today, catching a ride to Vincennes—a 20-minute trip through the winding rural hills of Pike and neighboring Knox County—he presses his face against the glass with every farm he passes, eagerly scanning the barns and fields for the white tanks with the signature green stickers. Only nine clean days since his attempted suicide, seeing those tanks and reliving the excitement in his mind still makes his heart race, his eyes widen. “Back in the day, I’d be up on those tanks and out in a flash, man,” he says. “Goddamn! It gives me a cold chill.”

Farmers around here aren’t worried about the loss of anhydrous. Losing five gallons from an 850-gallon tank costs them about $4.60, hardly worth the risk of trying to catch the culprits in the act, possibly getting shot or having the anhydrous thrown on them, burning them, instantly sapping moisture from their skin and choking them. They’re more concerned about the thieves breaking their equipment or not shutting off the gas. If they put a lock on the tank, the geekers would just break the lock and valve or drill holes into the tank itself, ruining it and spilling a flood of the noxious chemical out onto their fields, wasting $500 worth of fertilizer and creating a public health hazard for which they’d be liable. Some suppliers have embraced GloTell, a fluorescent dye added to the fertilizer to stain the drug and the thief’s hands pink. Of course, as with any additional means of securing the tanks and their contents, it’s an added cost that eventually makes its way back down to the farmers.

But by far the greatest meth-related concern among Pike County farmers is the danger and liability of having makers cooking on their land, in their cornfields. After all, these labs aren’t just found in basements, sheds, living rooms, and motel rooms. They can be packed into a car or duffel bag and taken wherever. The fast-spreading and telltale toxic smell of cooking dope drives the geekers into the fields and forests of the countryside. Meth’s corrosive ingredients can damage crops, and the hazard of mixing the volatile chemicals can cause explosions and fires. The Petersburg Volunteer Fire Department now includes tactics for handling meth-related blazes in its training, and although no one is keeping statistics that would prove an increase in chemical fires, town mayor and firefighter Jon Craig says firemen have strong suspicions. Unfortunately, due to the longer response time of a volunteer department, Craig says that by the time they get to the scene, evidence of meth’s presence is gone, burned up or carried off. Meadors remembers responding to a house fire and finding no sign of the owner except blood on the ground and on the brush in the nearby woods. They later found the bloodied man, cut up from jumping in and out of a broken window with armfuls of meth equipment he ferried to safety in the woods while his house was reduced to rubble and ash.

Mikey liked to cook in the woods, where he wouldn’t be bothered, where the smell wouldn’t give him away, where there was ample room to run if he was spotted. He loved the burst that crank gave him. But like most cookers, he found making it even more addictive. He loves the process itself. Grinding the pills—hundreds, maybe a thousand—to a fine powder, mixing them in a jar with the devil ether, then the cooling anhydrous. Dropping the lithium strips pulled from batteries into the concoction and watching it bubble with heat. The Christmas-morning anticipation as the jar sits and cooks for a couple hours while he readies his smoke bottle—a bottle containing salt and drain cleaner and capped with a hose running from its top. After removing the hazardous sediment by straining the cooked liquid through a coffee filter, Mikey licks his lips as he drops the smoke bottle hose into the jar, the steady stream of smoke kissing the pool’s surface, and conjuring the small white particles that form at the top of the clear liquid. He can hardly contain himself as he watches these tiny flakes, pure methamphetamine, plummet slowly through the clear liquid and nestle at the bottom of the jar. “I fucking love to make it snow!” Then the liquid is poured into yet another jar, strained through another filter, which is left holding a soft white sludge. When dried, the goop hardens into a rock of dope that can be broken off into ice or broken down into powder.

Mikey took great pride in the quality of the high that his customers got from his home-cooked meth. And he was addicted to the lifestyle. In a few hours the man who had been poor all his life could turn $50 bucks of ingredients into $5,000 worth of crank. Mikey will tell you that cookers often use too much of their own product to get rich, but the money is still better than the minimum-wage jobs that await a high school dropout. And better than the money is the power. Grown men would trade their cars, motorcycles, TVs, and stereos for a couple ounces. Women would perform any sexual act he could imagine. “It made you the man!” he says. “When you have some dope, everybody’s your friend."

June 1. Now Mikey has to abandon his friends. After more than a decade of addiction, he knows that if he’s going to stay clean, he’s got to keep himself from temptation. That means staying away from the drug, from his customers, his dealer and maker buddies. Essentially everyone he’s hung out with his whole life. His friend, Tony DeJarnett, helped him realize that. Today Mikey has left Pike County and headed to Vincennes to see DeJarnett and seek more of his aid and wisdom.

Like Mikey, DeJarnett grew up in Pike County. He lives with Mikey’s cousin Crystal, and is close to Mikey’s mom. He’s known Mikey for 25 years, and the two ran together for more than 15, cooking dope and shooting up together. Eight years his senior, DeJarnett has been where Mikey is. Now he’s where Mikey wants to be.

DeJarnett is sitting on the front porch of his Vincennes house, shirtless, in blue jeans and tattered black biker boots, drinking a cup of coffee and watching his 10-year-old son, Kevin, and Crystal’s kids Carter, 7, and Charity, 6, ride bikes and eat Popsicles in the yard. He’s been completely off dope for 2-and-a-half years. “Was a time not too long ago back at the trailer in Pike County when we’d make them play outside so they wouldn’t be inside while we were cooking and doing dope,” he says in a worn, raspy voice. He talks a lot. If he likes you, he’ll go on and on about the addiction, the constant battle of getting clean and the horrible things he did when he was on the drug. The talk is part of his recovery.

DeJarnett was one of the area’s meth pioneers. He can remember a time about 15 years ago when a state police officer pulled him over, searched his car, and dumped out

a jar of meth because he didn’t know what it was. “The cop just said, ‘Boy, your jar stinks. I think you might want to throw it away.’” The story makes DeJarnett laugh. Less funny are the memories of going to prison, where he got his nickname, “T-bone,” for bending a metal cafeteria tray across a fellow inmate’s face; the badass mentality came from the paranoia and violent effects of the drug and the gangster lifestyle that surrounds producing and selling it. “You get caught up in that attitude,” DeJarnett says. “You tote guns, thinking, ‘I’m hardcore! I’m bad!’ And you’ve got to stay bad.” He remembers walking into a room where children were watching cartoons, unplugging and taking the TV in lieu of the payment their desperate parents owed him for dope. “You think they respect you, but you only get people scared of you.” It was a persona he had to strip away to get clean, a frame of mind he knows Mikey’s going to have to kick as well.

“You’re a good guy when you’re not on that shit,” DeJarnett tells him now. Mikey looks down and shakes his head.

“I know. I know.”

“You can’t keep being the tough guy. All the tough guys are dead.”

DeJarnett had his own flirtations with death, as the stab and gunshot scars on his stomach attest. “When the drug has hold of you, there’s only two ways out: death or getting busted,” he says. “And I wasn’t going to get busted again.” He says he wanted to die but didn’t have the guts to do it himself. “It was going to be suicide-by-cop.”

Instead, DeJarnett got busted again and lost custody of his children to the state. Sitting in the Pike County Jail, he was facing prison when a social worker convinced the judge to let him go to rehab at Narconon Arrowhead in Richmond. There, for the first time, he opened up about his problem, his utter dependency on the drug. Talking helped. It gave him an honest look at himself, made him take the blame for his actions and the responsibility for his recovery. After three months he was released, and he took back his kids, his life. It hasn’t been easy. He relapsed several times at the outset. Fought to support his kids on disability payments he draws from a car accident that has made him prone to violent epileptic seizures. He thinks about the drug every day, and all around him are old doping buddies and cops who remember T-bone and are just waiting for him to slip up and take the inevitable fall back to meth.

Despite all this, today DeJarnett is one of the community’s most outspoken proponents of getting help for addicts in a part of the country rife with addiction. At least twice a week he speaks at an addiction therapy group at the local Samaritan Center. Almost everyone in the group is there because of meth. “Most of these people aren’t going to get clean,” he says. “Most of them don’t want to. But if we can help a couple of them who do get clean, keep them out of jail where they just trade recipes and become harder criminals, we can actually do some good. I mean, you can lock them all up for 10, 20 years, but when they get out, what do you think they’re going to do: Ignore all their buddies and hump a minimum-wage job at McDonald’s, or go back to what they know? They’ve got to want to change, and you’ve got to give them a reason to want to and the guidance to do it.” DeJarnett can see that Mikey’s reason has got to he his family, his two baby girls. That’s why he’s trying to use his connections to get Mikey into the highest level of local treatment, an Individual Outpatient Program—meeting three nights a week for eight weeks—at the Samaritan Center in Vincennes. If he gets in, it may postpone his sentencing.

“If you do this, you can get clean,” DeJarnett says to Mikey, who’s leaning on the porch rail. “You can get some time shaved off your sentence, maybe even work release. You can be out sooner. Be with your girls. Make this right. Be a dad.”

Mikey again looks down, quietly nods.

“Mikey’s going to make it. He loves his daughters,” say DeJarnett, as much to convince himself as to reassure his friend. Deep down, DeJarnett has his doubts about whether Mikey can shed his tough-guy armor and accept the things the clinicians and therapists and other recovering users are going to tell him. “You can’t bring that badass attitude,” DeJarnett continues. “People see me doing what I’m doing now, say I’m soft or I’ve sold out. I’m not 5-0, not a snitch, not a pussy. I just don’t want to see my son end up like I did. I don’t want to see my daughter going out with a dope dealer who’s going to sell her out on the street.”

DeJarnett goes to everyone of Kevin’s baseball games. He took his 16-year-old daughter, Tricia, to help her pick out a dress for prom. Both kids say he’s now a father. But he’s had to work hard in the past two years to earn their trust. They’re both old enough to remember their dad the way he used to be. DeJarnett prays Mikey’s daughters won’t have to carry such memories.

Tricia’s earliest vision of her parents is the view from the backseat of a car as she watched them curse and scream about who stole the dope. She grew up thinking spoons were supposed to be bent, in a house where guns were stashed under every seat, needles lay around on tables, and all the mirrors were coated with powder. At school, other kids would ask why her father had hen at their house at 3 a.m. They’d ask if she thought her dad had any dope for their parents. She hated him. The first time she was taken from her parents to live with her aunt, she remembers the sleepless nights, just waiting for the phone to ring, the police calling to tell her that her father was dead, OD’d or shot. Part of her hoped the call would come. At least then the drama would end.

Kevin remembers living in a house always filled with strange people who kept their backs to him. He remembers his dad feeding him 7-Up, making him pee in cups so customers could sneak his clean urine into drug screenings. He remembers waking up at 4 a.m. to find the lights on and the microwave still running with nobody home. Kevin remembers begging his way along on deals, waiting in the car while his dad stuffed a pistol down his pants and ran inside. “I just wanted to make sure he was okay,” he says.

DeJarnett alleges that the kids’ mother, now his ex-wife, is still on dope. She drives by their house from time to time; DeJarnett won’t let her see them. He describes her, bitterly, as “toothless and 10 pounds,” yet he pities her. “She’s told me that all she has to offer them are drugs and alcohol.”

In Petersburg, this slow, often quiet abuse is common. Family-service workers say that many kids feel responsible and grow up feeling guilty. Many have to raise themselves and younger siblings while their parents are tweaked or spaced out. Workers with the Pike County Department of Child Services say they’ve responded to calls where the parents are strung out and don’t even know where their 2- or 3-year-old is. They find children living in squalor, scarred and burned, lying next to needles on singed carpet, unbathed and unfed. They find infants screaming, unattended, strapped in car seats. They walk into homes that reek of urine; cat, dog, and human feces; or worse, the overpowering smell of anhydrous. “We find kids sitting in these labs and ask them, ‘How can you stand that smell?’” says social worker Julie Weeks. “They just look at us, puzzled, and say, ‘What smell?’” In Indiana in 2004, 1,833 children were removed from their homes and their parents because of drugs. And those numbers are growing: During the first seven months of 2005, there were already 1,085 drug-related removals.

Meth is at the center of this increase. Family-service agents who are supposed to be handling a maximum of 29 new and ongoing cases are crushed beneath as many as 60. These workers have spent extra hours in specialty training for dealing with meth-related problems; all now carry cell phones to call authorities when they fear for their safety. In addition, many are now in charge of drug-screening parents who want to visit with the children who’ve been removed from their care. To assure there’s no cheating, by bringing in urine, agents are forced to watch parents urinate in cups. “I never thought I’d be spending so much time watching people pee,” says Sharon Grayson, DCS supervisor for Pike and Knox counties. Only around a fourth of those screened test clean.

In Southwest Indiana, social workers found a girl whose job was to wash the glasses that had contained meth. They found a 13-year-old boy whose duty it was to steal the anhydrous and bring it back to his mom, who would then cook and shoot both of them up. They found a toddler stacking play money into his wagon, right beside stacks of real cash his parents made dealing meth. “This is modeling behavior,” says Grayson. “How do you undo that?”

But the effects are not only behavioral. Pregnant addicts pass meth to their unborn children. One member of DeJarnett’s support group, a nurse, confessed to smoking meth while pregnant. At age 22, she’d had a nursing degree, a house, a new car, a job in Vincennes, and a healthy baby girl. She first took the drug so she’d have enough energy to stay up and clean her house after long shifts at the hospital. She got hooked and moved herself and her daughter in with a cooker. A former prom queen, she dropped 40 pounds and quit her job. She says she became a live-in slave, cleaning and smoking out all day, even sometimes picking through the carpet and smoking pieces of deodorant that resembled meth. Her boyfriend would coerce her into having sex in exchange for a fix. She got pregnant. Kept smoking.

Her baby was born at five months, 11.5 inches, half a pound. His foot was the size of a pen cap. Eyes still not open, he gasped his first and last breaths in her hands. When hospital staff accused her of being a crack-whore or doper, she fled and immediately went back to the pipe. Today, with the support group’s help, she’s clean, going back to school to get her degree, and living with her parents so she can be a mother to her healthy 7-year-old daughter.

Some meth babies who survive are growing up with learning disorders, severe ADD, and other medical issues that schools and doctors are only now starting to observe and attribute to the drug. When Madison was born to a woman who had smoked meth, Mikey nervously counted fingers and toes. She appears fine, but even Mikey thinks she’s hyperactive for a child her age. He says his other daughter, Kaitlyn, was born to a different woman who smoked only weed prior to giving birth, and she’s much calmer. Kaitlyn and her mother live in an apartment in Vincennes. Because he has neither car nor driver’s license, and because DeJarnett’s is a packed house, Mikey will stay with them while he tries to get into treatment at the Samaritan Center. But it’s a dangerous arrangement: he alleges that Kaitlyn’s mother is now a doper. He’s begged her not to do the drug or have her drug buddies over around his daughter and him. The temptation to jump back on the needle, he fears, may be too great.

June 7. The apartment is in a bad part of town. Chances are, at least a couple of geekers and/or cookers are lurking behind any number of doors in the building. But the couch on which Mikey sits is plush, comfortable, nice. He smiles, watching little Madison play on the soft, clean carpet. The air is cool, tinged with the smell of cigarette smoke. No dope here. Madison, plump and pleasant, is waddling around in her dad’s oversized sandals, sucking on a bottle of iced tea and fidgeting with the sleeve of her T-shirt.

“Look, she’s trying to roll her sleeves up like Daddy,” Mikey says. He’s in good humor, relatively calm and, most importantly, clean. Things appear to be going well. The only problem: The apartment is not Kaitlyn’s mom’s, not in Vincennes, and not close enough to the Samaritan Center for Mikey to get treatment.

Temptation was too much. The Friday night after his first group meeting, his second night in Kaitlyn’s mom’s apartment, he alleges she had people over who started doing dope. At first, Mikey resisted. But it was useless. “I just watched them geeking and I wanted to feel what they were feeling,” he says. So he did what he always does. “I said ‘Fuck it!’” Prick, plunge, sweat, euphoria.

The reasons people use crank are as varied as the users themselves. It is a virtual wonder drug. Truckers and night-shift workers use it to stay awake. Women use it to lose weight. It heightens sexual drive and pleasure. It provides temporary escape. It gives you more energy. Makes you feel invincible. In Mikey’s case, the combination of boredom, a simple love of the high, and the peer pressure to be “Mikey the Badass” was all the reason he needed. The next day, he called his mom to come get him, bring him home. Ashamed but still determined to get clean, now he’s holed up in this Petersburg apartment waiting for his new plan to kick in. He’s going to Stepping Stone, a short-term—usually 30 days or less—residential treatment facility in nearby Evansville, where his wife, Melissa, is now trying to kick her addiction. Melissa used to be a runner for Mikey—the person who brought him pills and batteries in exchange for dope when he was too paranoid to go out himself. When she wraps up her treatment in a couple of weeks, Mikey says, Melissa is going to try to get him into Stepping Stone, even if she has to pay for it out of her modest savings.

The jangle of keys in Madison’s hand interrupts Mikey’s fragile focus. As she puts the keys in her mouth, Mikey says, “You can’t eat those, dork.

A chuckle comes from Mechel, renter of the apartment and owner of the keys. A middle-aged woman, she sits, legs folded beneath her on the loveseat adjacent to the couch, tugging on a Marlboro Light, enjoying the little girl’s bid for Mikey’s attention. Mechel is letting Mikey and Madison spend their days here because it’s cooler here than at his mom’s trailer, but also because she wants to help him. A paralegal studying criminology at Vincennes University, she knows meth. She wrote a paper about it for school. Her conclusion: “It is undescribable, the terrible effects this drug does to the user emotionally and physically, not to mention the effects it has on the loved ones standing on the outside watching this addiction without being able to do anything about it except put it in God’s hands and ask for their safety.” The impetus for Mechel’s paper is in the photographs on the wall behind her, black-and-white glamour shots of a healthy, bright-eyed young blond girl gazing happily into the lens. Her daughter, Ashli. “She was a model in high school,” Mechel explains. “She was so beautiful.”

As if on cue, a door opens and in steps the girl, groggy, just out of bed. Although only a handful of years removed from the photos, she appears to have aged dramatically, with lines around her eyes, scars on her stomach from when she would pick at it with a pair of tweezers, faded knife marks cut across her wrists. Walking into the living room, she runs her thumbs inside the folded-down waistband of her denim shorts, pulling the band as far from her thin stomach as she can. “They’re starting to fit again.”

Ashli graduated high school in 2001, fifth in a class of 89. She had experience modeling sportswear, and the University of Western Kentucky had offered her a cheerleading scholarship. She turned it down in favor of going to school closer to her friends at Vincennes University. She wanted to be a broadcast journalist. But in her second semester, she started getting into dope. “It feels like having 10 orgasms at once,” she says. Eventually she dropped out and moved in with a cooker boyfriend whose parents were also heavy into meth. Over the next few years, she battled the addiction, going on and off and back on meth and doing a bit of jail time along the way.

Then, around Thanksgiving 2003, she found out she was pregnant. She and her boyfriend vowed to quit together for the baby. They got jobs and found a house near Mikey’s mom’s on Sixth Street. Ashli says she stayed clean the entire time, but started finding burnt foils and other paraphernalia around the house. Her child was born on July 14, 2004. Six weeks later, on the night before Ashli was to go back to work, her boyfriend, who she says had already, suspiciously, been up for days, volunteered to stay up with the baby while she got a good night’s sleep. The next morning, she awoke to find her son on the couch, dead in his father’s arms. She alleges her boyfriend crashed, then passed out on the baby. But there was no proof. No charges of wrongful death were ever filed.

Ashli went into a wild, meth-crazed frenzy. She destroyed her car, beating in the hood, breaking out the windows. Slit her wrists, tried to kill herself. When things calmed down, two months ago, she came home to her mom, desperate for help. For days she lay in bed, her mom bringing her half-and-half milkshakes and stroking her head. She’s been clean for 60 days, save one relapse. But she stays here, away from her old friends, away from her ex-boyfriend who she claims still cooks and deals. Back up over 100 pounds from her anemic 93, she fires up a cigarette and looks at the pictures of herself on the wall. “I look like an alien when I’m on it, like I’m not real,” she says. “When I don’t do it, I’m real, I’m beautiful.”

Madison decides it’s time to reclaim the spotlight. She holds out the bottle to her dad. “Wa-wa?”

“You want water?”

“Wa-wa?”

Mikey jumps up, heads to the sink, dumps the tea, fills the bottle with water, and screws the top back on. “Here you go.”

She starts to drink, then looks at the bottle, confused. “Tea?”

“You little shit,” he says, laughing. “You could kick my ass with one little look, couldn’t you?” He jumps up again, remakes the tea bottle, then lies down beside her. She nestles her head on his tattooed bicep and starts to doze off.

“Look at that,” says Mechel. “Who wouldn’t want to get clean for that?”

June 12. The Silver Dollar Saloon is the hotspot of Petersburg. Set up on the first floor of an old brick Main Street building, it is essentially a wide hallway with an ancient tile floor and a few scattered tables and chairs. The centerpiece, a huge wooden bar, runs almost the entire length of the place. At night, the neon lights in the bar’s front windows join the interior incandescents to light up a usually hopping scene. But by day the room is dank, the few patrons at the bar reduced to shadows.

Today, two of those shadows are Mikey and his younger half-brother. The latter, clothes and scruffy face coated in dirt and black dust, is just off work at the nearby coal mines; he’s drowning the sorrow of an impending divorce with bottles of Budweiser and shots of tequila before heading home. Mikey is drinking the same. He’s sent Madison swimming with his sister and her kids and is washing down a couple Valiums he took this morning. He silences temptation with pills and booze, killing time and trying to keep his mind off the drug until he can get to Evansville next week. Even with the double dose of depressants, he’s hyped up, playfully exchanging body shots with his little brother.

“I said goodbye to this motherfucker at the hospital a couple weeks ago,” Mikey’s half-brother tells the bartender. “But he keeps coming back.”

“Fuck yeah,’” booms Mikey.

“He’s the best guy I know,” the younger man continues. “But he just fucks up. He needs help.” Then to Mikey, “That shit makes people stupid.”

Mikey’s half-brother has had his own experiences with dope. But as Mikey says, “He’s got willpower I ain’t got.” The two were born of the same father, but when the younger boy was in high school, he was caught with weed and expelled. His mother moved him down to Florida, where he lived with her and his stepfather, a working man who made him hold a job mowing lawns every day while he got his high-school diploma. Then he came back to Indiana, got a degree in heating and air-conditioning, found work at the mines, got married, and had two kids. “You gotta leave all your old buddies behind, concentrate on your family,” he says to Mikey, who’s had jobs roofing and working at McDonald’s. “You need to get a good job, be around people who want to be clean, who want to get up and go to work every morning. Otherwise you’re going to end up killing yourself.”

“It ain’t that I don’t want to,” Mikey says. “It ain’t that easy.”

June 12. Mikey’s young nephews are still leery of their uncle. “I’ve got Maddie with me today,” he says, crouching, holding out his hand to the befuddled little boy in the doorway of the house. “I’ve got my baby girl, so you know I’m okay.”

Before Mikey’s older half-sister Brandy moved her three kids to this Main Street home in Petersburg three years ago, they lived in a trailer no more than 75 yards from Mikey’s in rural Pike County. That was back in the height of his cooking and geeking days. Like the rest of his family. Brandy knew what her brother was up to, but she loved him, never judged him. When his power was turned off, she even let him run electricity from her house to his.

Still, there were moments that concerned her as a parent. Once, her son came home with a green Army duffel filled with jars, salt, an entire lab. Brandy called the cops but never thought of implicating her brother. “Most of these addicts and cookers aren’t bad people,” she says, taking a pull from a pint of Hot Damn 100-proof schnapps that Mikey brought her. “Everyone around here does it—former cops, courthouse clerks, teachers. But you’re not yourself when you’re on this shit. It makes you crazy.”

“It makes you violent,” Mikey shouts, literally jumping into the conversation. His eyes go wild, he clenches his fists. “It eats at you, makes you full of anger!” For punctuation, he rips the T-shirt off his chest, throws it to the floor and knocks over a glass of water. “Fuck,” he exclaims, “I lose so many shirts that way.”

Brandy laughs and uses the tattered shirt to soak the water from the carpet. Madison rushes in, crying because she fell while playing. In a flurry of movement, Mikey scoops her up, runs to the small pool on the deck, and, with her in his arms, sits down in the cool water. “See, you’re swimming now.” When the two come back inside, the child rests her head on her dad’s strong chest. His camouflage cut-off shorts soaked, he sits on the carpet and rocks, softly patting his daughter’s back. In a deep country dip, he starts to sing: “Holding you, I feel more love than I’ve known / Holding you is what I’ve wished for, for so long / You know you fill me with a deeply burning fire / Madison, you, you are my heart’s desire / When you are with me, babe, you make me feel so free / You make me happy, you’re everything I need / When I’m away, girl, your thoughts will never leave my mind ...”

He whispers, “I’ll write the rest when I go up.”

June 29. He’s drunk again, sitting on the concrete steps leading up to his mom’s busted door. The shade of the tin carport does little to relieve the intense heat and humidity of a midsummer day. Already he’s downed four Keystone Ice tallboys, still as warm as when he bought them. It’s 10:30 in the morning. He started drinking at 9. The rest of the beers are in the freezer.

Shirley’s place is bustling today, the sweltering air thick with the sound of kids laughing and the smell of burgers and hot dogs grilling. Mikey, Shirley, Melissa, and her son, Cody, Madison, Mikey’s sister, and her five kids are all roaming about, seeking respite in the shadows. It’s Mikey’s farewell barbecue. Tomorrow, he stands before the judge, where he’ll be sentenced and taken into custody. “I can’t believe I’m leaving my kid tomorrow,” he says, watching his daughter playing in a plastic pedal car. He shakes his head and sips his beer.

“Weed!” cries Madison, pointing as Cody passes a pouch of tobacco to Mikey.

“Everything you can roll is weed ’cause she’s seen daddy rolling so much,” he confesses. “I taught her how to say ‘Fuck the police’ when she was 1. One year old! I thought it was pretty cool at first. Now I realize I was teaching her disrespect for the law.” He shakes his head. “You gonna miss Daddy?” Madison looks back, confused, as if to say, “Where is Daddy going?”

Stepping Stone didn’t work. They kicked him out after three days, telling his lawyer he was using illegal drugs. “A crock of bullshit,” Mikey says. After that, Melissa took him to a facility in Illinois; they didn’t have an open bed. He tried detox at the hospital, but they released him after just five days.

“I’ve tried and tried,” he says, exasperated. “I’m a fucking idiot. That’s two weeks I could’ve spent with my kids.” He’ll be away from them for at least two years. They could be in kindergarten by the time he gets out.

“I want to see you go in,” says his sister. “Not because I don’t love you. But that’s the

only way you’re going to actually grow up.”

Mikey disagrees. “Prison ain’t gonna help. I’ll be a killer when I come out.”

Mikey turned his sister onto dope a couple years ago. He would bring the stuff over to her Petersburg trailer, and he and her boyfriend would geek. One night she got curious, dabbed a little in her drink. “I felt like I was having a heart attack,” she says. But after it settled and she was tweaked, she was hooked. Already a wiry 85 pounds, she dropped to 70. She grew paranoid, thinking cops were under the trailer and in the fields out back. She kept her kids home from school. “I just felt like I needed them here,” she says, but she was also afraid of what they might unwittingly tell teachers and other kids about what Mommy and Daddy were doing at home. (For school officials, the biggest indicator of parental meth use is decreased student attendance.)

Before long, Mikey’s sister’s boyfriend turned mean and abusive. Living in fear and a haze of addiction, he found it hard to hold a job. But after five years, the two decided it was time to quit. They started going to church and kicked the dope.

“Mikey still kept coming by, trying to sell us an eight-ball every now and again,” she says, looking at her brother.

“I felt bad,” says Mikey with a nervous burst of laughter. “But I needed their money so I could buy the shit to make more dope.” He notices his wife sitting on the swing, attending to her son. Quickly, he motions to his sister, who reluctantly sneaks him a Darvocet from her purse. Gesturing toward Melissa, he says, “She don’t want me taking pills.” Unlike Mikey’s, Melissa’s time at Stepping Stone seems to have been successful. Following 45 days in treatment, she’s trying to keep her family clean.

After lunch, Mikey’s sister and the kids leave. He bugs each one at least five times. Sorrow creeps over his face, but he doesn’t cry. “Don’t do no good to shed no tears,” he says. “Don’t change a thing.”

He decides to go for a drive, to blow off some of his frustration. He passes the jail, where he’ll most likely spend tomorrow night. Stopped at one of the Main Street lights, he breaks his uncharacteristic silence. “Other people brought it to me, but when it comes down to it, I brought it on myself.” Then a long pause. “When I get out, I can’t stay here. I’ve got to get out of this fucking town.”

Photo by Tony Valainis

This article appeared in the October 2005 issue.

IM CRIME FILES: Deadly Decisions

by Dann Denny — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 16:04:00 GMT

Editor’s Note: The following originally appeared in the April 1995 issue and is included among IM's Best-Ever Crime Stories. In August 1995, Ajabu, Adams, and Walls were convicted of murder. All three received life sentences and are currently incarcerated in Indiana prisons. IM ran a profile of Ajabu’s father, Mmoja Ajabu, in December 2008.

On a July evening in 1993, Kofi Modibo Ajabu was driving down a residential road when a dog darted in front of his ’86 Renault. Ajabu stomped on the brake, but the front bumper smacked the mongrel, sending the dog sailing through the air. Rather than drive on, Ajabu jumped out of the car and rushed to the stricken pooch, which lay on its side, whimpering. Sitting on the shoulder of the road, the young man spoke soothingly to the dog and stroked its head until, a few moments later, it breathed its last. Then he placed the body in the backseat of his car and drove through the neighborhood, knocking on doors until he found the animal’s owners and explained what happened.

That’s the side of Ajabu his friends and family like to describe when they recall the 22-year-old son of Black Panther Militia leader Mmoja Ajabu. But there was another Kofi Modibo Ajabu, too: the one who apparently played sidekick to a man who slit three young people’s throats.

Too impressionable at best, cold-blooded at worst, Ajabu now sits in a stark prison cell, awaiting a June murder trial that could cost him not only his liberty, but his life. Along with James Walls, 21, and Raymond Adams, 27, Ajabu stands accused of the so-called Carmel murders—the triple slaying in the affluent Thistlewood subdivision (north of Carmel) on March 16, 1994.

The brutal murders of 17-year-old Nick Allemenos, his 13-year-old sister, Lisa, and 23-year-old family friend Chris James sent a chill through the Carmel community, apparent evidence that random crime could strike anywhere, any time. But the crime wasn’t random, authorities say: In an ultimate case of bad judgment, Nick had invited Adams into his home to buy marijuana from him, then opened his door to him the next night because Adams supposedly knew someone who wanted to buy Nick’s bike.

Then again, there was plenty of bad judgment to go around. Until that March evening, Ajabu and Walls had no record of violent crime—or much of any crime, for that matter. Walls’s arrest record was blank, while Ajabu’s only prior brush with the law involved an arrest for allegedly stealing a gun at a gun show in 1993. Even that incident might have been a misunderstanding: Both Ajabu and a witness maintained that he simply picked up the firearm and immediately put it down.

Moreover, the two became acquainted not through some dishonest activity, but through their work. In September 1993, Ajabu took a job at a Noble Roman’s restaurant, where he befriended Walls, a co-worker. Soon Ajabu was attending the boisterous late-night parties that Walls hosted in his far-northside apartment. Their penchant for partying, however, would bring more problems than an occasional hangover. Walls, who had moved from Coral Gables, Florida, only months before the murders, met Adams at a party shortly after his arrival and struck up a friendship. When Adams asked to move in with Walls at Tudor Lake Apartments, Walls agreed. Later, during a party at the apartments, Ajabu met Adams.

In retrospect, the triumvirate appeared ill-fated from the start. Adams—5-foot-10, 270 pounds and the oldest of the trio—bore a rap sheet as long as a scroll, his first arrest occurring at the tender age of 11. Even more significant, he gravitated toward younger people whom he could dominate, police say. “When Adams committed burglaries in his late teens, he ran with 12- and 13-year-olds,” says a sergeant with the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. “He struck me as a person who desperately wanted to be a leader, but could only function that way with people six or seven years younger than he was.”

As a student at Broad Ripple and North Central high schools he showed a flair for art, but little else. An indifferent student and social misfit who failed to graduate from either school because of chronic truancy, he later earned a GED at North Central and in ’92 attended summer and fall sessions at IUPUI. Adams’s adolescent years were rife with misdeeds and conflicts at home, where his mother and stepfather grew weary of his trouble-making ways. If he wasn’t wrapping his stepfather’s Camaro around a tree, he was getting arrested on charges of burglary, check forgery, or credit card fraud. Once, while working as a pizza delivery driver, two friends “held up” Adams, then divided the spoils with him. At age 19 he left home for good—living with friends and doing odd jobs (mainly in restaurants as a busboy) and building up his juvenile arrest record. “He left of his own free will; we didn’t kick him out,” says his stepfather, Jim Bushrod.

But that’s exactly what he told a family that took him under its wing: that his parents had forced him to move. Adams rewarded the family’s compassion by taking their credit cards and making lavish purchases. Adams’s champagne tastes, coupled with his beer budget, made credit card fraud one of his favorite crimes. He once used a stolen card to buy an $800 bicycle and fancy bicycle shoes.

“Raymond struck me as the type of person who wanted to have things. But he didn’t want to work for them,” says the sergeant. “When he was at North Central, which draws a mix of students from affluent and poor neighborhoods, he saw what some of the wealthy students had, and he wanted those things, too.”

A former classmate recalls Adams as a charismatic type. “In high school, he was the class clown, always cutting up at school and partying on the weekends. He’d come walking down the hallway with a big smile on his face, and everyone would say, ‘Hey, Raymond, what’s going on?’ But if he had the opportunity he would steal from his own friends. He was a conman, even in high school.”

The classmate found out the hard way after giving Adams a ride to the hotel where he was staying. (Adams claimed he’d been kicked out by his parents). “As soon as we pulled up to the hotel, police surrounded the car and arrested both of us,” the classmate recalls. “It seems Adams had been robbing the hotel rooms while he was living there.”

Throughout his teens and early 20s, Adams racked up more and more arrests, mostly for comparatively minor crimes such as burglaries and bungled scams. He briefly landed in the Marion County Jail and the Indiana Youth Center, but was still beating the system at the time of his most recent arrest: Charged with writing a bad check at a grocery, he was released on $1,000 bond and shunted into a diversion program. Though people with long rap sheets normally don’t qualify, Adams was allowed in because the amount of money was small and the store simply wanted to recover it. By successfully completing the program and two years’ probation, Adams could have nixed any record of the forgery arrest. But instead of erasing his past, he left an indelible mark on his future.

His alleged accomplices once seemed like good candidates for a walk down life’s straight-and-narrow path. Ajabu’s mother recalls that at age 9, her son was sitting in a pew at the Mt. Olive Missionary Baptist Church, when the preacher’s message seemed to move him. To her surprise, at the altar call he walked to the front of the church and told the preacher he wanted to accept Jesus as his savior and be baptized.

At Westlane Middle School, Ajabu was pleasant and well-behaved, but his academic indifference frustrated his teachers. “He was a bright child who had a lot of capabilities he didn’t use,” recalls Ron Davie, the school’s assistant principal the time. “I don’t think school work was his No. 1 priority.” Ajabu seemed more interested in tae kwon do, weightlifting, sketching charcoal pictures of super heroes, and taking care of his pets: hamsters, frogs, spiders, lizards, even a baby boa.

His cavalier attitude in the classroom concerned Ajabu’s parents, who expected him to go to college. “He’d say, ‘But Dad, I already know that stuff,’’’ Mmoja recalls. “I’d say, ‘Son, people don’t give you credit for what you know. Only for what you show them you know.’”

But at North Central, his motivation level rose and fell like the tide. If he liked the instructor or found the subject intriguing, he generally earned an A or B. If not, he wound up with a C, D, or F.

Because he was articulate and loved to write, he excelled in English and language classes. Science and math were his bane. Throughout high school he maintained a C average—a source of unending frustration for his parents, especially when he consistently scored in the top 10 percent on standardized achievement tests. But whenever they urged him to knuckle down, he would say, “Just leave me alone. I can do it if you’ll just leave me alone.”

Instead of studying, however, Ajabu preferred to bury his head in a J.R.R. Tolkien or Stephen King novel, or leaf through some of the 100-plus comic books he kept in a large trunk. He also loved Disney, Ninja Turtles, and Chuck Norris videos, plus his all-time favorite—ironically, The Nightmare Before Christmas.

For him, high school was merely something to be endured. Things were anything but dull at home. Ajabu’s parents often disagreed on how he should be raised. Jane desperately wanted him to remain in the Baptist church, while Mmoja rejected Christianity and became a Muslim in 1975. Modibo (as his family calls him) hung onto his Christian faith for years, but converted to Islam as a high school senior. Jane and Mmoja separated several times, most recently in the summer of ’93, and Jane says they probably will divorce.

Some observers have speculated that his father’s Black Panther rhetoric tainted Modibo’s attitude toward the murder victims: three young white residents of an upper-class neighborhood. On a personal level, however, Modibo had little contact with the Panthers, his mother says. Though he attended some meetings and marches, it was mostly to please his father, she says.

Before he met Adams, she says, her son had always made quality friends. But not this time, Jane admits. “Somehow he was charmed by this man, “ she says.

Mmoja had met Walls and Adams on several occasions and didn’t care for them. Mmoja became so uneasy that in the fall of ’93, he picked up his son at Jane’s house and brought him to his own home to live. “I needed access to his head,” he says. “I didn’t have a good feeling about those two. I said, ‘Son, you’re flirting’ with a hurtin’.” The younger Ajabu still lived with his father at the time of his arrest.

Walls, whose background is harder to trace, began working at Little Caesars and Noble Roman’s after coming to Indianapolis. Signs of Adams’s influence may have surfaced even before the murders: In January 1994, Walls told police he was robbed while trying to make a cash deposit for his employer. The story mirrored one of Adams’s favorite cons, in which an employee with access to company money claims to have been held up, then divides it with the “robbers.”

Despite his two jobs, Walls still failed to pay his rent, falling so far behind that in early ’94 he received an eviction notice. Walls was upset, but not as much as Adams, who—despite having no business living there in the first place—called the landlord to give him an earful.

Then, Walls said, Adams began looking for a way to raise enough money for a house, and on March 15, he found it. That evening a mutual friend introduced Adams to Nick Allemenos at the latter’s home. During his 30-minute visit, in which he sold Nick marijuana, Adams learned that Nick’ s father, George, was golfing in the Caribbean—leaving Nick home with his sister, Lisa, and friend Chris James, who also lived there.

The next evening Adams wanted to return, claiming a friend wanted to look at the bike Nick wanted to sell. Nick agreed, but worried that Adams was dangerous after seeing him flash a 10-inch knife and call it his “right-hand man,” says Nick’ s girlfriend, Karen Kennelly. James even packed a.32-caliber revolver before Adams came over on March 16.

But he never got to use it. Adams, Walls, and Ajabu arrived just before midnight and went straight to work. By their own admission, Walls and Ajabu bound and gagged Nick with duct tape while Adams did the same to James and Lisa. Then, Walls and Ajabu both say, Adams slashed all three victims’ throats with a black-handled knife.

What turned a simple robbery into a triple homicide remains an open question. If Adams indeed killed all three victims, why would the small-potatoes con man engage in such senseless savagery? The clue may lie in Adams’s criminal history, which authorities feel contained warning signs of uncontrolled rage. During many robberies, he not only grabbed the cash but left behind a disturbing calling card: smashed cash registers, computer equipment, and TV monitors. Perhaps the fury he directed toward inanimate objects suddenly found a new target: three nice-looking, popular, well-to-do young people who seemed to have everything he didn’t.

Both Walls and Ajabu swear they had no idea Adams would kill the victims. Walls says he knew only that Adams planned to rob the home and rough up Chris James if necessary. James was assistant manager at George Allemenos’s hardware store, and Adams presumed he knew the store’s safe combination and alarm code, said Walls. Ajabu claims he thought the three of them were going to a party.

Yet, according to testimony, neither he nor Walls behaved like horrified spectators. Walls—hardly a waif at nearly 6 feet tall, 230 pounds—said that when he saw Adams thrust his knee into James’s back, cradle the young man’s chin, and pull backward in an attempt to break his victim’s back, he simply left the room so he wouldn’t have to watch. And later, when he saw James bleeding to death on the floor, he apparently did nothing to help.

Both Walls and Ajabu admit they carried electronic equipment and other belongings from the home and loaded it into Walls’s Honda, George Allemenos’s ’92 BMW, and Nick’s ’90 Audi—at the same time Adams was inside the house, cutting the victims’ throats. Later, Walls said, he thought he heard Ajabu making fun of the noises one victim made as he choked on his own blood.

Whatever his intentions, Ajabu missed several opportunities to distance himself from the murders, and perhaps even prevent them. At one point, Walls said, Adams disarmed James, tossed the revolver to Ajabu, and told him to hold it—yet Ajabu did not confront Adams.

Even if Walls and Ajabu felt intimidated by Adams, neither can claim they had no opportunity to escape his influence. The trio left the Allemenos residence in separate cars, depositing Walls’s Honda at his apartment complex, abandoning the Audi in Marion County, and taking the BMW to Chicago, where they pawned some of the stolen property. Then they caught a bus back to Indianapolis and returned to the same apartment that Walls was supposed to have moved from.

Hours later, Kennelly, concerned that Nick hadn’t picked her up for school, found the bodies. Running from the house, she fell to her knees and screamed, “Nick’s dead. they’re all dead. “

About 26 hours after the killings, at 4 a.m. on March 18, police arrived at the apartment, arrested the three men, and took them to the Hamilton County Jail in Noblesville. Hours later Mmoja was in bed watching the morning news on TV. “Oh, my God!” he screamed at the top of his lungs, as his son’s face splashed across the screen. Mmoja phoned Jane at school, who felt her heart lurch when she heard the news. That afternoon she found herself in Hamilton County Superior Court No. 2, watching in a daze as police officers led her handcuffed son into the room. “I’ve never fainted in my life, but when my eyes met his, I felt my knees buckle,” she says. “He just looked straight at me and said, ‘I didn’t do it, Mom.” Ironically, when Jane went home that night, she found a letter from Jackson State University. It stated that her son had been accepted for the fall semester.

During his first few weeks behind bars, Ajabu still didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of the situation, repeatedly asking his parents, “I didn’t hurt anybody; why am I here?” Undoubtedly he has since learned the cold truth about Indiana law, which—in terms of punishment—makes no distinction between an actual murderer and his accomplices. All can be held equally culpable; therefore all three defendants could be executed.

Friends and family cling, perhaps naively, to the “good kid, bad influence” theory. Mmoja has told his son that he “screwed up,” but feels God will give him a second chance. “That’s what I’m praying for,” says Mmoja, “A second chance.”

Jane says she has bought her son a gift for every holiday he’s been in prison and placed it in an old black trunk trimmed in gold. “When he finally comes home, we’ll open it up,” she says. “Then we’ll have all our holidays at once. “ Mashariki Jywanza, who has known young Ajabu since he was an infant, says, “Modibo is a very decent kid, but unfortunately, he hooked up with the wrong type of individual.”

But whether Ajabu merely hooked up with the wrong type of individual or was himself the wrong type of individual may never be known entirely. Could the same young man who showed compassion for a dying dog have found amusement in the last gasps of a dying human being?

As for Adams, not long ago a teenage girl whom he had never met arrived at the Hamilton County Jail to give him a present. Smiling warmly, she extended her right hand and gave him a Bible. “Thanks,” Adams said, taking the book.

Perhaps within its pages he will find forgiveness for the crime he’s accused of committing. But for him and his co-defendants, finding forgiveness in a court of law may be considerably more difficult.

Memorial: A year after their murder, memories of the three victims burn brightly.

More than a year later, loved ones still have trouble accepting the loss of Lisa and Nick Allemenos and Chris James. But those who remember them talk not about how they died, but how they lived.

No one speaks of Lisa without mentioning her smile. “She lit up the room,” says Bill Baker, her Carmel Junior High science teacher.

An honor student, she participated in Girl Scouts, track, cross-country, and a non-denominational Christian youth group. Three years before her death, she began taking violin lessons and developed an immediate love affair with the instrument.

Lisa would practice a half hour every day after school, despite a joint problem that caused her fingers to swell and throb with pain. “While I was taking roll call, she would rub ice packs on her hands,” recalls Baker. “But she never complained about it.” The pain paid off, however: A month before she died, Lisa won first place for a violin solo at a regional contest. Nick, 17, an A student who planned to major in pre-med at Hanover College, served on Carmel High School’s student council, acted in two school plays, and did his own radio show on Carmel’s 24hour FM station.

An intense individual, he could be opinionated, says teacher Mark Shoup, who still remembers the day Nick walked into his office after reading a book that Shoup had recommended. “He threw the book at me and said, ‘Mr. Shoup, this is trash!’” the teacher says. But Shoup more than redeemed himself when he placed a copy of Gary Paulsen’s Eastern Sun, Winter Moon into Nick’s hands. Enraptured by Paulsen’s prose, Nick devoured more than a dozen of the author’s books.

When Paulsen came to Indianapolis to speak last spring, just a month after the murders, he was told about Nick’s admiration for his writing. Paulsen was so touched that he announced he would dedicate his new book, Father Water, Mother Woods, to Nick’s memory.

More than anything, Chris James, 24, enjoyed the fishing trips in Canada that he took each summer with his father and a group of mutual friends. But a cloud hung over the 1989 outing because three of the elder members of their contingent had passed away during the previous year. So James and a friend climbed into a canoe, paddled to a large rock in the center of the lake, and attached a small brass plaque bearing praise for the three men.

Last summer, his fishing group made its annual pilgrimage to Canada. But before the first hook hit the water, a couple of the men paddled out to the large rock in the middle of the lake. This time, in honor of Chris, they added a second plaque directly below the first. “Sometimes we cry because we miss him,” its inscription says, “but we will always smile because we knew him.”

This article appeared in the April 1995 issue.